THE BRITISH AMONG DARK RACES

West Coast Times, Issue 10438, 17 December 1896, Page 4

THE BRITISH AMONG DARK RACES

(Spectator.)

There is one link — or shall we call it resemblance ? — between the English and the , Russians in their external action. Both can manage the dark races of mankind without the sense 1 of exhausting ef- ! fort, and both therefore tend towards a perpetual extension of their dominion over those races. Whatever happens to either of them, and whatever professions they may make, both Tare perpetually receiving the submission of new tribes, and neither, when once the submission has lasted a few years, are much troubled by insurrections. The curious amalgam of pity, contempt, physical dislike, and debire to pee justice d-">ne, which constitututes British feeling towards all but white men, produces a line of conduct which, when once fairly understood, seems to incline the dark masses of the world to acquiesce in British ascendency. They seldom or never like their ruler?, whose coldly proud regard chills all enthusiasm for them, and they occasionally resent their industrial demands ; but they greatly respect THE AUDACITY WHICH INSJSTS ON THEIR ' SUBMISSION (

whatever the numerical odda may be : they are aware that justice is intended if it is not always done ; and they are seldom, almost never, so provoked as to feel that emancipation would be worth the terriblestruggle by which alone it could be obtained. The war of the dark peo-jj es against the British is never, therefore a war to the death, and of -^ ye res ' is . tance there is exceedingly little. The truth of this statement has been manifested throughout British history in India, native leaders, however successful, never succeeding in rousing the real people, while province after province, often equal in area and population to a great State, after trying the ordeil by battle once, or in the cases of Mysore and the Sikh kingdom, twice, has sunk back half-sullen, half-contented, but for all pohtioal and social purposes acquiescent It has been shown in Egypt, where, if Europe "would leave things alone we could govern the Valley of the i o f the Nile from Alexandria to Khartoum with five thousand white regulars, a small force ot mobile artillery, and twenty fchowand black troops, who would be "just as trustworthy as the soldiers from Great Britain. So strong is this disposition araon« dark men that the greatest difficulty of the Khalifa arises from the fact that his subjects, as distinguished from his followers, hail the British invaders as deliverers, and that Sir Herbert Kitchener m actually able to enlist the black " Dervish " soldiery, and asetlnm almost without a pause for drill, against their former masters. They enlist as readily as Patnans have always done after being

BEATEN BY THE WHITE INVADERS. A negro gentleman, whose experience m Africa has beeu of a most extensive and exceptional kind, tells us that everyWhere m the oast, west and centre he found among negroes, who to him talked jonfidontialiy, the saraededsion, that English rule wag endurable, and that no other white rule was. It seems almost certain , ttmt, if Europe permitted, we could §ov-

ern from Alexandria to the Lakes, ami that, though our troubles might be various and great, insurrection, even local and sporadic insurrection would speedily cease to be one of them. It will be the same in South Afiiea as soon as the colonists fall back on the permanent and sound British principles, that the only temptation to work shall be wages, and the only coercion the pressure of natural hunger and taxation. At present the Colonists procure labor, especially for mines, by pressure on native chiefs ; that is, in fact, they impress labor by aid of the chiefs' authority at about half the rate which <vonld bring volunteers. It is impossible to estimate the advantage which this readiness of black and brown peoples to obey them gives to the British people in their advance over the world. Not only does it act as a solvent to resistance, but it makes it easy for us to raise entire armies of auxiliaries, who are very nearly as good as our own troops, who are much leas costly, who are up to a point as trustworthy as our own, and who if they rebel, (as has happened once in our history) on a great scale, do not draw with them the elements of a popular revolt. In

THE GREAT MUTINY OP 1857. it repeatedly happened that with troops in lull and successful revolt the peasantry ten miles off were paying their taxes and thronging the Courts as if nothing had occurred. If we would grant to the dark men even a decent chance of rising to a command, say even of cavalry only, so as to tempt their natural leaders to become soldiers, we might with ease form a colonial army of Indians, negroes, Soudanese and Zulus of two hundred thousand men the equal of any troops in the world, except, perhaps, a very few picked regiments ot Pomeranians, Guardsmen, or Zouaves. We dread a little too keenly the spread of Russian dominion as an injury to those over whom it is extended. It is not an injury until they have reached the point when almost unlimited freedom is beneficial to them ; it is not an injury, for example, m the Khanates, where the natives used to punish truancy in slaves with blindness. As we do not quite see sufficiently the expediency of avoiding a contest with Russia for the same area of ' dominion and of arriving at s ome territorial understanding which would allow us both to expand without interference. We are the two peoples of the future, and no doubt may ultimately be

FORCED TO COME TO DEATH-GRIPS ; but meanwhile there is a vast amount of work which, if we could only a^ree together, we could accomplish in comfort,— tor instance, we could turn Siberia into a Canada, could make of Thibet a comparatively civilised region, could turn Persia into a most profitable garden, and could Fescue the Armenians, a people with a genius for the industrial life, once for all trom their oppressors. None of these good things will be accomplished by spitting at each other in newspapers and protocols, the only positive result of that offensive proceeding being that we are both compelled to suspend the doing of good work in order to stand on «uard

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