LORD KITCHENER'S PROJECT.
THERE is something in Lord Kitchener's proposal to found a great College in Khartoum by subscription in Great Britain which will, we think, deeply touch the national imagination. To conquer Ethiopia by the un. sparing use of scientific weapons, and begin instantly to diffuse light and to make savages into men who the moment they are made will claim independence,—there is a daring unselfishness about that thought which English, men, the most imaginative of all the races of earth, will thoroughly understand. Lord Kitchener, it is true, under. estimates the money required ; he will no more get such a staff of teachers as he requires for £2,800 a year than he will get them for as many pence ; but that is a detail of very little significance. He will get any money he needs for his purpose fast enough—he has received ..£50,000 already—if only because he thus enables Englishmen free their consciences from a doubt which always vexes them, the doubt whether the sword is ever God. Almighty's ploughshare; there are teachers in hundreds to be Ob. tained at missionary rates of pay; and as for the students, we have yet to hear of that College in Asia or Africa which was not full to the lip on the day that it was opened. If we could open a College in Mecca to-morrow, it would by Christmas be swarming with the best blood of Arabia ; and though the Soudanese are not Arabs, they have just that Arab tincture which determines their ideals. For ages past what have they known of higher than themselves that was not Arab ? They will learn all you can teach, and " technical " knowledge beside, for they are negroes,—that is, men who love gain, and are willing, if only you will not worry about punctu. ality, to labour hard to acquire it. The English are always stupid about that. They never can realise that eight hours' work is eight hours' work even if the work. man chooses his hours, and think Sicilian sawyers laze because it suits their temper to work like slaves from 3 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. to 5 p.m., and to loaf in the middle of the day and through the long, sweet evening time. We do not doubt the readiness of all the tribes, Shillooks included, if they can be persuaded to dress, to fill the classes to repletion, and become surveyors, engineers, doctors, traffic managers, and even men of learning, pure learning, learning without use having had a singular attraction for all the men of the East, even including Chinamen, ever since Egyptians and men of Chaldrea studied astronomy and endeavoured to foresee the future of the soul.
But we are afraid of one thing. Lord Kitchener is striking the note at which all future education in Ethiopia will be pitched, and we fear the note is wrong. He and his future colleagues and subordinates evidently intend that the education they give shall be given in Englisb,' that is, shall lose almost all its vivifying power. They propose, it seems clear, to repeat the blunder which' India owes to Macaulay, and which has spoiled the results of a splendid effort continued for half a century. That narrow man of genius, who could not conceive that a great politician need not be a 'Whig, insisted on English training instead of training in the vernaculars or in Persian—in his time the lingua franca of the East—and we have as a product the "edu. sated native," who, though a much abler being than_ is commonly taken to be, is the despair alike of the politician and the moralist. No race will ever be civilised through teaching in a tongue in which it does not think, and when the teacher is a Northern and the learner an Asiatic—that is, when the two men's thoughts tarn on different pivots—the jar between their ideals produces nothing but mental bewilderment, and a breakdown of all the supports among which character is built up. I whole generation with magnificent powers was one trained up in that way, and you had as product the men of the Renaissance, who to-day would be hung by the score. The scholars of the Soudan will not be like thee, though Arabs succeeded in all departments of thought, including, strange to say, navigation ; nor will they Ix like the Baboos whom England has created and no regards with such scorn ; but they will be people who are not wanted, saturated with surface-ideas which are sca built up on their own ideas, but are only thinly veneer over them. It is not as if any peremptory necR say existed for this course. The book does 13 exist which cannot be translated into Arabic; there is no science, except perhaps electricity, of which Arabs did not detect and describe the beginnings ; and we speak on far better evidence than our own when we say that there is no literature which cannot be rendered into Arabic with no more loss than the Psalms have suffered in their rendering into English or German out of an Arab dialect. All Soudanese who know anything know some- thing of Arabic, and all who know nothing think of it as the language by which, if they knew it, they would be raised in the scale of creation and of society. Why throw away that wonderful instrument by which, if we use it, one-half the awful fissure between the minds of the West and the East will at once be bridged ? We cannot, we well know, produce conviction, for we write under the burden of hopelessness, and the whole utilitarian world is bitterly against us. The English is convenient because you can get English teachers cheap, because it will extinguish French, a language which has corrupted the Turkish Pasha olass, because it will smooth the path of all young officers, and because it will make the work of engineers, railroad managers, electricians, and all their kind—a most valuable kind in a way—somewhat easier to them ; and for this convenience all else that is included in education will be sacrificed. There is nothing to be done but submit; but seeing the blunder twice repeated, once in India and again upon the Nile, we cannot refrain from an ineffectual protest, or from the question whether the thoughtful really consider the negroes of the Southern Slates, who all know English and have all been free for thirty years, higher persons intellectually than the men who built the Alhambra and maintained for two hundred years the civilisation of Bagdad.
Previous page
