A PLEA FOR THE NATIVE 397 



needs a Kipling's pen to do it justice. It is the story of a 

 long, hot, bloody, morning's righting, from sunrise till 

 eleven o'clock. It is the story of how the Waganda rallied 

 to the help of the white man, because the white man had 

 first come to them in the blessed guise of their mission- 

 aries. His enemies were their enemies, his friends, their 

 friends. It is the story of how, ill-armed as they were,, 

 without discipline, led by one of these same missionaries - 

 Mr. Pilkington they charged and charged again, on hill- 

 top crowned by deepcut trench and heavy thorn boma. 

 Their opponents were trained and disciplined soldiers, 

 inured for years to war; a race of men accustomed to con- 

 quer, and these fought from behind a stockade strong and 

 high and from whose trenched corners a new and deathly 

 engine of war, the Maxim, cut them down in swaths and 

 heaps. Yet, on that morning, these men, in a quarrel, not 

 their own, threw away their lives gladly, tore at the boma 

 with their hands, and retreated only when their war chief 

 and Mr. Pilkington were shot dead, and nine hundred of 

 their bravest lay beside them. 



"Little use to missionize the nigger, he has no grati- 

 tude," says the ignorant. The story of Lubwas Boma 

 is no uncertain answer to such slander. 



So much for the native's capacity for better things. 

 But were that capacity even far less than it is, were he a far 

 more embrutalized man, were he lacking, as he is not, in 

 those qualities which enable him to advance when he is 

 wisely helped and ruled and educated; there remains one 

 factor in the problem of his future, which is often forgotten 

 and yet may not be evaded. He is in Africa to stay. He 

 will increase. The country cannot be a country without him. 



In other lands colonized by the Circassian, the native 

 has not been necessary, absolutely necessary, to the devel- 

 opment of the land seized on. In Australia no one needs 

 poor "Jackie." In the United States and Canada, the native 



