UGANDA, AND THE NYANZA LAKES 373 
of life; constantly striving to better them and bring them 
forward, but not twisting them aside from their natural 
line of development, nor wrenching them loose from what 
was good in their past, by attempting the impossible task 
of turning an entire native population into black English¬ 
men at one stroke. 
The problem set to the governing caste in Uganda is 
totally different from that which offers itself in British 
East Africa. The highlands of East Africa form a white 
man’s country, and the prime need is to build up a large, 
healthy population of true white settlers, white home¬ 
makers, who shall take the land as an inheritance for their 
children’s children. Uganda can never be this kind of 
white man’s country; and although planters and mer¬ 
chants of the right type can undoubtedly do well there—to 
the advantage of the country as well as of themselves—it 
must remain essentially a black man’s country, and the 
chief task of the officials of the intrusive and masterful 
race must be to bring forward the natives, to train them, 
and above all to help them train themselves, so that they 
may advance in industry, in learning, in morality, in ca¬ 
pacity for self-government—for it is idle to talk of ‘"giving” 
a people self-government; the gift of the forms, when the 
inward spirit is lacking, is mere folly; all that can be done 
is patiently to help a people acquire the necessary qualities, 
—social, moral, intellectual, industrial, and lastly political 
—and meanwhile to exercise for their benefit, with justice, 
sympathy, and firmness, the governing ability which as yet 
they themselves lack. The widely spread rule of a strong 
European race in lands like Africa gives, as one incident 
thereof, the chance for nascent cultures, nascent semi- 
