All That I Wish To Urge
Regarding The African At Large Is That He Has Been Mismanaged Of
Late Years By The White Races.
The study of this question is a very
interesting one, but I have no space to enter into it here in
detail.
In my opinion - I say my own, I beg you to remark, only when
I am uttering heresy - this mismanagement has been a by-product of
the wave of hysterical emotionalism that has run through white
culture and for which I have an instinctive hatred.
I have briefly pointed out the evil worked by misdirected missionary
effort on the native mind, but it is not the missionary alone that
is doing harm. The Government does nearly as much. Whether it does
this because of the fear of Exeter Hall as representing a big voting
interest, or whether just from the tendency to get everything into
the hands of a Council, or an Office, to be everlastingly nagging
and legislating and inspecting, matters little; the result is bad,
and it fills me with the greatest admiration for my country to see
how in spite of this she keeps the lead. That she will always keep
it I believe, because I believe that it is impossible that this
phase of emotionalism - no, it is not hypocrisy, my French friends,
it is only a sort of fit - will last, and we shall soon be back in
our clear senses again and say to the world, "We do this thing
because we think it is right; because we think it is best for those
we do it to and for ourselves, not because of the wickedness of war,
the brotherhood of man, or any other notion bred of fear."
The way in which the present ideas acting through the Government do
harm in Africa are many. English Government officials have very
little and very poor encouragement given them if they push inland
and attempt to enlarge the sphere of influence, which their
knowledge of local conditions teaches them requires enlarging,
because the authorities at home are afraid other nations will say we
are rapacious landgrabbers. Well, we always have been, and they
will say it anyhow; and where after all is the harm in it? We have
acted in unison with the nations who for good sound reasons of their
own have cut down Portuguese possessions in Africa because we were
afraid of being thought to support a nation who went in for slavery.
I always admire a good move in a game or a brilliant bit of
strategy, and that was a beauty; and on our head now lie the affairs
of the Congo Free State, while France and Germany smile sweetly,
knowing that these affairs will soon be such that they will be able
to step in and divide that territory up between themselves without a
stain on their character - in the interests of humanity - the whole of
that rich region, which by the name of Livingstone, Speke, Grant,
Burton, and Cameron, should now be ours.
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