A PLEA FOR THE NATIVE 391 



friends of the earlier morning, but one group had found an 

 employer who organized and directed them, the other had 

 not and therein lay the difference. 



These Waganda are everywhere spoken of as being 

 the most advanced and the most readily civilized of all the 

 Central African tribes. And, after seeing the houses they 

 have builded for their kings, and the fine brick cathedral 

 (it seats four thousand people, if I remember rightly) they 

 have put up for their Protestant worship, it is easy to under- 

 stand the optimism of those missionaries, who cheered all 

 Christians the world over, by declaring that a great Chris- 

 tian people would soon arise to power on the shores of these 

 great lakes. But the best of us are at times apt to forget that 

 neither in Africa nor yet in Europe does tyranny make for 

 true civilization. We stand aghast to-day at the long- 

 drawn-out blood-letting that is bleeding Russia. White 

 men lose their heads there; they have been themselves 

 crushed for so long that they seem to have lost all belief in 

 any other methods than those of "crushing." They have 

 been the victims of barbarism, cruelty, and ignorance for 

 so long, that cruelty and injustice have become, in their 

 eyes at least, subordinate and inconsiderable evils. Tyranny 

 has eaten away, as an awful natural law decrees that it 

 shall, something of their moral consciousness. 



So, in the Wagandas' case, the tyranny of their kings 

 has left the people lacking in sturdy uprightness. (I 

 speak here with hesitation, my knowledge of the Waganda 

 being, of necessity, a second-hand knowledge: I did not live 

 among them as I did among the tribes farther east, though 

 I had plenty of opportunity of consulting those who had 

 intimately known them for years.) The Waganda are 

 untruthful and dishonest; they have a cringing way with 

 them which does not appeal to the stranger. For upright, 

 self-respecting manliness, they did not seem to me to com- 

 pare at all with the wilder and far poorer people of the higher 



