This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
418
AN ALTERNATIVE PLAN
chap.

bear in mind that you cannot have an Alexandra feeding bottle and a latch key; they must choose one or the other. At present, the Crown Colony system gives neither. Under it the trader is treated like a child, a neglected child, one of those interesting but unfortunate children who have to support an elderly relative, who would be all the better for a cheap funeral.

Upon the missionary and educational side of the system I have advocated I need not enlarge. Just as trade should go on under it free, so should mission effort; there should be no governmental forcing of either, but it should be steadily borne in mind that the regeneration of the considerable amount of broken up stuff which exists in the Coast town regions—the Africans who have lost their old culture and their old Fetish regulation or conduct without being completely Europeanised—is a work that can only be effected by the missionary, and therefore in the hands of the missions should be placed the whole education department, with the one demand on it from the Government that in their schools every scholar should have the opportunity of acquiring a sound education in the rudiments of English reading, writing and arithmetic. Give him this knowledge, and your brilliant young African has demonstrated that he can rise to any examination such as an European university offers him. Under the system I advocate there need be no limitation as to colour in the officials employed in the municipalities. In the sub-commissioners' towns the head officials must be Englishmen, but among the regions under the Landes Hoheit in the hinterland, Africans educated as doctors or as traders could have grand careers provided they did honest work.

The consideration of the African side of this system of