THE COUNTRY 33I 



again. He is moved about from one post to another, trans- 

 ferred from a tribe he is just beginning to understand, and 

 which on its part is just beginning to understand and trust 

 him from a great district, that at the cost of real privation and 

 sometimes sickness he has travelled over, to a tribe totally 

 different in usages and language which he knows nothing 

 about and to a new district, as unknown to him as the 

 Sahara. His hard-won knowledge is all thrown away, 

 and a new man, knowing nothing of his people, takes his 

 job, to continue or not, as the case may be, those plans and 

 policies that he and he alone had thought out and begun to 

 put into operation. Still, somehow he does well. He has 

 poor and uncertain support from Nairobi, and is often 

 obliged to live in a climate that saps his health. He is 

 poorly paid, he is wretchedly pensioned. Yet in a great 

 majority of cases he is and does what an English gentleman 

 is expected to be and do, for he conies from that recruiting 

 ground for men of worth, the middle classes of England. 



The English civil servant in British East Africa, as 

 everywhere else in the world, is a clean, honest, capable 

 gentleman. He is the class of man that England above all 

 the other nations has succeeded in rearing and binding to her 

 service. A man, that under circumstances of loneliness, dis- 

 heartenment and danger has done more than any other class, 

 I don't even except the soldier, to hold unbroken, in spite of 

 its vast extension, what Kipling in an immortal verse has 

 called her "far-flung battle line." 



He should be better paid, he should be better pensioned, 

 he should be better supported at his outpost. " Ah, there is 

 no money," "There are limits to the English taxpayers' 

 capacity to pay up margins of expenditure for unprofitable 

 colonies." Admitted! But one wrong is done him which 

 might be quickly righted without the cost of an extra sover- 

 eign. He should be listened to, and he is not. His reports 

 are pigeon-holed when he is abroad, and when he comes 



