Go Down To West Africa
Yourself, If You Doubt This, And Carry On A Series Of Experiments
With Them In
Subjects they know of - trade subjects - try and get the
best of a whole series of matured adults, male or
Female, and I can
promise you you will return a wiser and a poorer man, but with a
joyful heart regarding the capacity of the African to grow up.
Whether he does this by adding convolutions or piling on his gray
matter we will leave for the present. 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.
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