UGANDA, AND THE NYANZA LAKES 431 



Most wisely the English Government officials, and as a rule 

 the missionaries, have bent their energies to developing 

 them along their own lines, in government, dress, and ways 

 of life; constantly striving to better them and bring them 

 forward, but not twisting them aside from their natural 

 line of development, nor wrenching them loose from what 

 was good in their past, by attempting the impossible task 

 of turning an entire native population into black English- 

 men at one stroke. 



The problem set to the governing caste in Uganda is 

 totally different from that which offers itself in British 

 East Africa. The highlands of East Africa form a white 

 man's country, and the prime need is to build up a large, 

 healthy population of true white settlers, white home- 

 makers, who shall take the land as an inheritance for their 

 children's children. Uganda can never be this kind of 

 white man's country; and although planters and mer- 

 chants of the right type can undoubtedly do well there to 

 the advantage of the country as well as of themselves it 

 must remain essentially a black man's country, and the 

 chief task of the officials of the intrusive and masterful 

 race must be to bring forward the natives, to train them, 

 and above all to help them train themselves, so that they 

 may advance in industry, in learning, in morality, in ca- 

 pacity for self-government for it is idle to talk of "giving" 

 a people self-government; the gift of the forms, when the 

 inward spirit is lacking, is mere folly; all that can be done 

 is patiently to help a people acquire the necessary qualities 

 social, moral, intellectual, industrial, and lastly political 

 and meanwhile to exercise for their benefit, with justice, 

 sympathy, and firmness, the governing ability which as yet 

 they themselves lack. The widely spread rule of a strong 

 European race in lands like Africa gives, as one incident 

 thereof, the chance for nascent cultures, nascent semi- 

 civilizations, to develop without fear of being overwhelmed 

 in the surrounding gulfs of savagery; and this aside from 

 the direct stimulus to development conferred by the con- 



