202 
BRITISH CENTRAL AFRICA 
How few of the many hundreds who have enjoyed missionary hospitality, 
nursing and assistance have remembered that their entertainers were men 
receiving salaries from ABo to £300 a year, often with a wife and family to 
maintain. How many have attempted to make any subsequent return for the 
help afforded, not perhaps in monetary or other gifts, but in fair words. 
It has been so fine a thing at first to encounter in the wilderness such 
disinterested goodness, such heroic attempts in the face of the greatest 
difficulties and dreariest discouragements to lead oneself and to teach others 
to adopt the higher life, that your first impressions are of unbounded admiration 
for the missionaries and their work. If you stay in the country, say three years, 
your final verdict is likely to be that of your first impression ; but if you 
frequent the mission for merely three weeks you will find yourself beginning 
to criticise ; the demeanour of the mission girls has lost all shyness and may 
even perhaps be lacking in modesty, for these young women when they get 
beyond childhood have lost all fear of the white man and have not been 
subjected to the excellent native discipline which enforces amongst the women 
a modest bearing and a certain amount of deference towards people of the 
opposite sex. You will, at first, be disagreeably impressed with the native 
catechists, or readers, or deacons, or whatever title the trained native adherents 
of the mission may bear: with their profuse display of religious phrases, their 
clumsily cut European clothes, 1 contrasting with an often sensual face, their off¬ 
hand manners and great conceit. But pause a moment before you too hastily 
condemn the results of mission teaching. These clothed negroes, whose very 
clothing is an offence as it often induces uncleanly personal habits, and a con¬ 
sequent disagreeable personal smell, and whose aping of European ways is a 
provocation to criticism, are nevertheless more useful members of the community 
than an untutored savage. They may be cheeky if you attempt, as many white 
men do, a bullying manner, but they are men of the world. They will not offer 
you physical violence nor attempt to oppose your researches into their country; 
on the contrary they will make common cause with you, and espouse your 
cause if necessary against their wild brothers. They are now British subjects, 
emphatically as much wedded to the British policy with all its mistakes and 
even with any temporary injustice it may entail, as you are. Gradually they 
or their descendants will find their proper place. When by education and 
inherited culture they are on the level of the white man, then by all means let 
them take their place as his equal. The British Empire is, or should be, 
independent of considerations of race and colour, and should take as its sole 
standard of citizenship, mental, moral and physical qualifications. Otherwise 
we have no right to interfere with these alien races, and teach them to walk in 
our ways, and submit to our rule. 
The fact is that it takes at least three generations before any clear apprecia¬ 
tion of the principles of morality, truth, gratitude and honour can penetrate the 
intellect and curb the instincts of the negro. Nor in this disadvantage is he 
singular amongst the backward races of mankind. The same statement applies 
equally to the Red Indian, the Polynesian or the Papuan. You cannot in a year 
or two convert a wolf into a sheep dog, or a skulking jackal into a black and 
tan terrier; this change cannot be effected in the one individual, as a rule, no 
matter how long he may live ; the result can only be attained by generations 
of transmitted culture, induced by constant restraint and careful education. 
1 This item of criticism cannot be made to apply to the pupils of the Universities Mission who are very 
wisely made to dress in long “ kanzus,” or garments of Arab style. 
