Labour 89 



severe. We say this because with regard to the black 

 lives now being washed out on these tides and lost beyond 

 recovery, their sufferings and anguish has been, and are 

 being, short and sharp compared with what ours will be 

 if future generations are starved out or have " to go 

 under " to tinted superiors. If they do so the fault will 

 be ours. Such a catastrophe will be entirely due to tlie 

 fact that, in this, the Twentieth Century of the Christian 

 Era, the White Race was too brutal, too selfish, and too 

 indifferent as to the wellbeing of those to follow, to take 

 serious steps to increase and not decrease the coloured 

 races of Africa and elsewhere. 



M. Cureau calls attention to this (p. 26) when he tells us 

 " The ethnography of our sul)ject appears to be all disorder 

 and confusion. The races, nations, tribes and families 

 which share the soil of the Dark Continent are innumer- 

 able. There is nothing to aid us ^ in untangling the skein, 

 for we find here neither monuments nor traditions, and the 

 science of anthropology '^ — which has never, as a matter of 

 fact, been made the object of serious and generalized 

 investigation — is swamped in an ocean of types which 

 differ from one another by imperceptible gradings, from 

 the individual to the entire black race." 



Those who have had to do with natives, and especially 

 those who have watched the white and coloured men when 

 actually handling them, kindly or otherwise, and too often 

 (through not understanding the men, through impatience, 

 over-fatigue, and, let us say, at times through brutal 

 indifference to the sufferings of others) it has been a case 

 of otherwise, will agree with M. Cureau when he tells us on 

 p. 37 (when about to discuss those who consider that the 

 natives are hopelessly depraved and stupid), that we must 

 remember that " Passing judgment upon other people is 



' Up to the present. — Ed., T.L. 



^ In Tropical Life for March, 1912, when discussing the work carried 

 out by Major and Mrs. Tremearne in connection with the tailed head 

 hunters of Nigeria, the Hausa and other tribes (see " Hausa Superstitions 

 and Customs," price 21s., which we published for Major Tremearne), we 

 concluded our plea for more attention to the anthropological study of 

 native races under the British flag, by expressing the hope that " this 

 country, governors and governed alike, will give more encouragement to 

 those who study race-history and see that anthropology is placed at least 

 on the same level as entomology, mycology, &c., and that those carrying 

 it out are paid at the same handsome rates for studying the history 

 of man as their fellow-scientists receive for studying trees, bugs and 

 beetles." 



