Labour 91 



m 



means to save what of the primitive races is left, and 

 tending these, gradually improve, house, look after and 

 inter-breed them, one kind with another, until we have 

 learnt how to increase their numbers and improve the 

 breed, as has been done in P2urope by raising the level of 

 comfort and through that the standard of intellect in the 

 lowest classes. We must mate a primitive with one a 

 shade better (but only a shade, for big jumps up are a 

 mistake) in the social scale, and so, like that wizard, 

 Luther Biirbank, has done with plants, gradually raise up 

 a new and improved type of a still purely tropical race, 

 indigenous to the soil, just as we have done and are doing 

 by very slow stages with birds, beasts and plants. 



We apologize to our readers for having devoted so much 

 space to this question of the preservation and improvement 

 of the primitive races, but do so because we feel that, 

 handsome and imposing as may be the agricultural and 

 commercial palace that the super-scientist and the super- 

 financier shows us on paper, it can still only be a " Castle 

 in Spain." We say this because, when the building is 

 completed, it will never stand, but always remain rotten 

 and sinking in its foundations if the native labour on which 

 it can alone be erected is not equal to and in everywise 

 worthy of the building itself. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

 Lord Leverhulme on the Natives in Africa. 



Tropical Life, April, 1917. 



Speaking at a meeting of the Colonial Section of the 

 Royal Society of Arts, after a most interesting paper on 

 the economic development of the Belgian Congo, by 

 Monsieur Horn, LL.D. (Brussels), with Sir Arthur Steel- 

 Maitland, M.P., Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, 

 in the chair, Lord Leverhulme (then Sir W. H. Lever) 

 said that, as one who had travelled with M. Horn through 

 the Belgian Congo, he was of opinion that the author had 

 not overstated the prospects of the country or the great 

 work that the Belgian Government carried on there; in 

 fact, he had understated and underestimated whenever he 



