UGANDA AND THE SOUDAN 
473 
act in dealing with far-away possessions is this : choose 
your man, change him if you become discontented with 
him, but while you keep him back him up. 
In Uganda the problem is totally different. Uganda 
cannot be made a white man’s country, and the prime 
need is to administer the land in the interest of the 
native races, and to help forward their development. 
Uganda has been the scene of an extraordinary develop¬ 
ment of Christianity. Nowhere else of recent times has 
missionary effort met with such success. The inhabi¬ 
tants stand far above most of the races in the Dark 
Continent in their capacity for progress towards civiliza¬ 
tion. They have made great strides, and the British 
officials have shown equal judgment and disinterested¬ 
ness in the work they have done ; and they have been 
especially wise in trying to develop the natives along their 
own lines, instead of seeking to turn them into imitation 
Englishmen. In Uganda all that is necessary is to go 
forward on the paths you have already marked out. 
The Soudan is peculiarly interesting because it 
affords the best possible example of the wisdom—and 
when I say that I speak with historical accuracy—of 
disregarding the well-meaning but unwise sentimen¬ 
talists who object to the spread of civilization at the 
expense of savagery. I remember a quarter of a century 
ago, when you were engaged in the occupation of the 
Soudan, that many of your people at home, and some of 
ours in America, said that what was demanded in the 
Soudan was the application of the principles of indepen¬ 
dence and self-government to the Soudanese, coupled 
with insistence upon complete religious toleration and 
the abolition of the slave-trade. Unfortunately, the 
chief reason why the Mahdists wanted independence 
and self-government was that they could put down all 
