414 THE LAND: OF THE Lion 
at the Colonial Office any settled policy regarding it, which 
its governors and executive officers are ordered to pursue. 
Fairness, firmness, sympathetic knowledge, and a fixed 
policy — these are manifestly necessary to its well-being, 
to the prosperity of its native population, or the success of 
its white colonists. And these as yet East Africa has not had. 
But great and immediate as the need is to help the 
native East African to acquire habits of industry, habits by 
which alone he can climb out of savagery, by which alone he 
can be made co-worker with the colonist, I should indeed be- 
little Christian missions — what they have accomplished and 
what they aim to do — were | to speak of them as only busy 
in the endeavour to materially advance the black man’s 
status. He who “made of one blood all nations of men 
for to dwell on all the face of the earth,” has ordained that 
though man may not live or advance without toiling, yet 
by toil alone he cannot grow to manhood’s stature. Bread 
is easily come by in most parts of Africa, and by bread and 
bread alone, the native has, in his poor, downtrodden, 
slavery-haunted state, been forced to live. But he is a 
man, and as man has had need for, and right to, a higher 
life, which cannot be lived by bread alone. For the seeds 
of future manhood within him, for the signs and promises 
of a better and higher life, who cares to-day? 
Dwarfed and stunted as he is, few see promise or hope 
of these things within him. The missionary does; in them 
he believes; for them he waits. In their first faint spring- 
ing he seeks and finds his exceeding great reward. 
African darkness in the past and in the present is the 
darkness of a continent without deals, a continent given 
over to the vainest of all vain efforts, the effort to live with- 
out ideals. In the face of such materialism, an abiding pro- 
test against it, lives, teaches and dies the missionary. Some 
smile on him as a visionary, a very few still slander him as 
a self-seeker, but the men who see and know, the men 
