RELATIONS BETWEEN WHITES AND BLACKS 135 
the twenty yards down to the river the negro had 
endangered all my buildings ! 
The greater the responsibility that rests on a white 
man, the greater the danger of his becoming hard to- 
wards the natives. We on a mission staff are too easily 
inclined to become self-righteous with regard to the 
other whites. We have not got to obtain such and 
such results from the natives by the end of the year, as 
officials and traders have, and therefore this exhausting 
contest is not so hard a one for us as for them. I no 
longer venture to judge my fellows after learning some- 
thing of the soul of the white man who is in business 
from those who lay as patients under my roof, and 
whose talk has led me to suspect that those who now 
speak savagely about the natives may have come out to 
Africa full of idealism, but in the daily contest have 
become weary and hopeless, losing little by little what 
they once possessed of spirituality. 
That it is so hard to keep oneself really humane, and 
so to be a standard-bearer of civilisation, that is the 
tragic element in the problem of the relations between 
white and coloured men in Equatorial Africa. 
