age rapidly, although, notwithstanding all that is said by casual observers who have no sense of analogies, they work no harder than the wives of the ordinary European working man. Wherever in tropical Africa the people are driven into the European system, both political and economic, they wilter. The Baganda of Uganda are one of the most intelligent of African peoples. Yet they are dying out under the influence of the European system, or nominal system, of monogamous unions. The Europeanised African of the West Coast towns who wears European clothes, and whose women don corsets, stockings and fashionable footgear, is far less long lived than his ancestors, and has far fewer children. As a class the educated West African is a perishing one: a class which, at heart, is profoundly unhappy. The whole notion and policy of Europeanising the inhabitant of the tropical belt of Africa is a profound error of psychology, totally unscientific. The tropical African is a bad labourer when he is working for the white man; an excellent labourer when he is working for himself, a free man. In the former case, although capable of great attachment, he will, if that attachment is lacking, which is usually the case et pour cause, desert at the first opportunity. And the lash, which is freely used all over tropical Africa where the system of European-managed plantations has been introduced, is a brutalising medium, alike for those who suffer from it and for those who have recourse to it: it is also the invariable precursor of bloodshed. Tropical Africa can produce, and does produce, abundantly as we shall see in the next chapter, under its own system of land tenure, co-operative labour and corporate social life.
A last reflection would seem to be called for in connection with the Portuguese Cocoa Islands. The reasons of the excessive death rate among the contracted labourers may have been accurately diagnosed in these pages, or it may not. But there it is. If it cannot be overcome, what right has an industry to continue, however great the trouble lavished upon it, however obvious the utilitarian argument militating against habitual and deliberate ill-treatment; which destroys one hundred out of every thousand men in the prime of life every year, so that in ten years the thousand men have vanished from the face of the earth?
