330 THE LAND OF THE LION 



Trenchant and true as this criticism is, it at once calls 

 forth a counter criticism. If this is so, if such obviously 

 wise and necessary courses have been habitually neglected, 

 how do you account for the equally obvious advance the 

 Protectorate has made ? How is it that in spite of stupid, 

 and worse than stupid, muddling in Uganda, the bloody 

 buccaneering policy that was allowed to continue there 

 for a time, in spite of the folly and injustice that drove the 

 best quality of East Coast natives to leave the country and 

 settle after the Mazuri Rebellion (1895) in German ter- 

 ritory how is it that the country can even hold its own ? 

 There is just one answer to this and only one. It is not 

 that the Colonial Office has, so far at least, greatly improved 

 on the management of its predecessor, the Foreign Office; 

 it is not that in the service of the Protectorate the worth 

 and work of the officer is now always acknowledged and 

 he no longer has appointed over his head "the man with 

 the pull," it ought to be so, but as yet it is not so. But 

 it is just this: that the ordinary young Englishman, 

 employed by his country to do one of her difficult and 

 thankless jobs in a distant land with but little to reward him 

 and much to discourage him, is the most honest, conscientious 

 and successful civil servant in the world. In British East 

 Africa he still comes out to a job too often unprepared, 

 or but partially prepared, for it, having had scarcely a 

 rudimentary education fitting him for it. He scarcely 

 ever knows anything of the language when he lands. He 

 is put often into positions where such knowledge should 

 be a "sine qua non." He, of course, makes many mistakes. 

 I have often seen him on the magistrate's bench or in his 

 working room at an outlying Government Boma, struggling 

 with his Swahili dictionary, or perspiring and patient 

 while some native evidence slowly trickles its way through 

 the confused and twisted channels of two native interpreters, 

 Kikuyu into Swahili, Swahili into English, and so back 



