ii8 VII. SOCIAL PROBLEMS IN THE FOREST 
natives develop naturally into a peasantry attached to 
the land and practising home industries, while, at the 
same time, the population is so thick that the labour 
requirements of European trade can also be met ; 
there, then, the problems of the condition of the natives 
and the promotion of civilisation among them are far 
less difficult than in the colonies where the country is 
mostly virgin forest and the population is at a really 
primitive stage of culture. Yet even there, too, it may 
come about that the economic progress aimed at by 
colonisation is secured at the expense of civilisation and 
the native standard of life. 
What, then, is the real educational value of the much . 
discussed compulsory labour as enforced by the State ? 
What is meant by labour compulsion ? 
It means that every native who has not some 
permanent industry of his own must, by order of the 
State, spend so many days in the year in the service of 
either a trader or a planter. On the Ogowe we have 
no labour compulsion. The French colonial adminis- 
tration tries, on principle, to get on without any such 
measure. In German Africa, where labour compulsion 
was enforced in a humane but effective manner, the 
results were, according to some critics, good ; according 
to others, bad. I myself hold labour compulsion to be 
not wrong in principle, but impossible to carry through 
in practice. The average colony cannot get on without 
having it on a small scale. If I were an official and a 
planter came to tell me that his labourers had left him 
just as the cocoa crop had to be gathered, and that the 
men in the neighbouring villages refused to come to his 
help at this critical time, I should think I had a right, 
and that it was even my duty, to secure him the labour 
