THE COUNTRY 359 



a modest fortune and on this he contentedly retires to 

 his own country, taking every rupee he has made with him. 



Now the Hindi has been a necessity. He is a neces- 

 sity still. His little trading shop exists everywhere under 

 conditions which no white man's shop could face. It has 

 often proved an immense convenience. The Hindi who 

 comes here, however, is not, so I am told by those who 

 know India, the best sort of an Indian. Certainly the 

 natives do not respect him. He degrades them and 

 cheats them. Economically he may be a convenience, 

 but morally he is a curse. 



His coming in the first instance was a necessity. The 

 English policy of "muddle" had brought on the Uganda 

 mutiny, and the home authorities, who could not be 

 induced to spend a few thousand pounds to pay promptly 

 the arrears due to an over-worked and underfed couple 

 of battalions of expatriated Soudanese troops, came 

 suddenly to the conviction that they would spend several 

 million pounds to build a railroad, and so make sure of 

 their hold on the rich Uganda land that had been so 

 nearly lost to them. No preparations having been made, 

 the work must be rushed through at all costs, though 

 there was really no reason whatever to hurry. The little 

 band in far-away Uganda had shed their blood freely, 

 and Uganda and Englishmen, civilian, soldier and mis- 

 sionary, had beaten that mutiny and had won out. But 

 it is England's way first to refuse to do anything and then 

 to make up for lost time by trying to do everything at 

 once; so the Uganda railroad was ordered to be rushed 

 through. The ignorant and terrified tribes of the interior 

 who had been harried for ages by slave hunters and who 

 only managed to live in the country through which the 

 railroad had to pass after leaving the coast by hiding their 

 huts and villages in densest forest and thorn scrub, could 

 not be induced to bring their labour. Their refusal forced 



