12 APRIL 1945, Page 2

A Great Englishman

No Englishman probably had done more in the last half-century for the constructive development of the British Empire than Lord Lugard, who died on Wednesday after a short illness. The services he rendered were of the highest kind, for though his career was in the first instance military—the first war he fought in, in Afghanistan, was as far back as 1879—his campaigns were directed mainly against the slave trade and native misrule in Africa. The three outstanding achievements in his career were his success in securing the retention of Uganda (reduced by his own efforts) for the Empire in. 1893, in the face of the whole of the Liberal Government except Rosebery ; his initiation of the policy of indirect rule through native chiefs during his Governorship of Nigeria in the first five years of this century ; and the publication of his great book, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa in 1922. This African classic (on whose revision he had been working continually) embodied Lugard's fundamental doctrine, that the interests of the African native and the British industrialist could and should be reconciled ; but there is no question that he would put the native interest first if ever there was an in- evitable clash. The African native, indeed, has rarely if ever had a more zealous or effective protector. As such Lugard was recognised to the end equally by African administrators and missionaries and by leading anthropologists whose work lay in one region or another of the African continent.