talking nowadays about Portugal's part in African history is enough to make the uninitiated imagine that the sweet innocent things have no past of their own, and never knew the price of black ivory.
"Oh, but that is all forgiven and forgotten, and Portugal is just what she always was at heart," you say. Well, Portugal at heart was never bad, as nations go. Her slaving record is, in the point of humanity to the cargo, the best that any European nation can show who has a slaving West African past at all.
The thing she is taxed with nowadays mainly is that she does not develope her possessions. Developing African possessions is the fashion, so naturally Portugal, who persists on going about in crinoline and poke bonnet style, gets jeered at. This is right in a way, so long as we don't call it the high moral view and add to it libel. I own that my own knowledge of Portuguese possessions forces me to regard those possessions as in an unsatisfactory state from an imperialistic standpoint; a grant made by the home government for improvements, say roads, has a tendency to—well, not appear as a road. Some one—several people possibly—is all the better and happier for that grant; and after all if you do not pay your officials regularly, and they are not Englishmen, you must take the consequences. Even when an honest endeavour is made to tidy things up, a certain malign influence seems to dodge its footsteps in a Portuguese possession. For example, when I was out in '93, Portugal had been severely reminded by other nations that this was the Nineteenth Century. Bom Dios—Bother it, I suppose it is—says Portugal—must do something to smarten up dear Angola. She is over 400 now, and hasn't had any new frocks since
