THE COUNTRY 339 



fallacy should receive its death blow at the hands of the 

 ruling executive, while unfortunately it has too often there 

 been accepted and approved. The powers that be are 

 used not so much to punish as to shield actual lawlessness; 

 of incompetence I do not speak. Law-breaking officials 

 must be shuffled out of the country, the aim being not to 

 vindicate law in the keen eyes of the native, but to hush up 

 scandal, to get bad men who have broken the law out of the 

 country, to get them out as quickly as can be, but on no 

 account to punish them. In German land a white man 

 goes to prison promptly. 



Englishmen may be slow to believe it, but this policy 

 is in actual operation to-day and it is as foolish and as 

 shortsighted as it is unmoral. No Government any- 

 where under the sun, in past times or in present, gained 

 anything by following it, and it is, thank God, opposed 

 to all Anglo-Saxon history and tradition. 



The education of the native tribes is the immediate 

 need of the land. When I speak of the education of 

 the native I am far indeed from wishing to imply that 

 the wild children of the land should be taught and put 

 to school. I use the word in its widest sense. I mean 

 the training, the helping, the compelling of the native to 

 fit himself gradually to those new conditions that inevit- 

 ably follow the white man's occupation of the country. 

 Justice, common justice to him, demands as much at 

 the white mans* hands. 



The education he needs can only be given him when 

 first a thorough and sympathetic study has been made 

 of him and of his environment, of his past as well as of 

 his present. And it is just here that the well-intentioned 

 educators and missionaries of former days made their 

 mistakes, and courted and won failure, failure for them- 

 selves and the wards they loved, but loved unwisely. 

 Africa is a land of failures; we have as yet no knowledge 



