ABSTRACT
In the September issue of the Nineteenth Century Review an elaborate defence of the policy responsible for the recent disturbances in Sierra Leone, is attempted by Mr. Harry L. Stephen. The defence is conceived in a spirit that finds but too ready acceptance at a time, when the perfervid cult of the Imperial idea threatens to obscure those first principles of morality and righteous dealing towards native races, upon which the greatness of our Colonial Empire is based. To the natives is attributed the maximum of vice; to the white Administrator, an infallibility which must never be questioned. To demur to the former proposition is to exhibit a sentimentalism at once unhealthy and absurd; to doubt the latter, involves the charge of lack of patriotism. It has seemed to the writer of the present pamphlet that this form of reasoning, as applied to the Sierra Leone troubles, should not be allowed to pass without protest. /
“Not only do the Negroes not die off in the face of white civilisation in Africa, but they have increased in America, whereto they were taken by the slave trade. This fact urges on us the belief that these Negroes are a great world-race – a race not passing off the stage of human affairs, but one that has an immense amount of history before it. The moulding of that history is in the hands of the European whose superior activity and superior power in arts and crafts gives the mastery; but all that this mastery gives is the power to make the future of the Negro and the European prosperous, or to make it one of disaster and misery to both alike. Whatever we do in Africa to-day, a thousand years hence there will be Africans to thrive or sur for it.” – Miss Kingsley, 3 in “The Story of West Africa.”
