THE MAHDI'S REMAINS.
WE cannot profess to -feel deeply excited about the question of the Mandi's remains. Had Mr. Morley been able to bring before the House of Commons any instances of cruelty and oppression by our soldiers, white or black, which were encouraged, tolerated, or not severely punished by British officers, no discussion could have been too minute or too serious, and no condemnation too severe. If, that is, Mr. Morley could have shown that Lord Kitchener had acted with tyranny and barbarity to the living, his pro- test would have been justified a thousand times over. Since, however, it is not even alleged that Lord Kitchener allowed or committed any act of cruelty on the. Dervishes, we cannot help feeling that the debate was not only wasted and mis- directed, but that it 'did a serious injury to the cause which Mr. Morley doubtless has most sincerely at heart. It cannot, we think, be denied that the debate was a fiasco, for practi- cally no one, or almost no one, of any weight voted with Mr. Morley, and the whole tendency of the argument was against him. In a word, Mr. Morley and his supporters had a bad beating, and the result will be, we fear, to encourage men to think that considerations of . sentiment and humanity need not be taken into consideration by our builders of empire. Yet, in reality, nothing is more important than to con- vince Englishmen overseas and in the wilder parts of the Empire that they must refrain from doing anything which is barbarous and cruel, and to make them feel that the Empire will never succeed if it does not rest on a foundation of humanity and nobility of feeling. The im- portance of keeping up a high standard of conduct among our officers abroad cannot possibly be exaggerated. In all wild places, and especially in Africa, there are constant temptations to acts of cruelty and oppression. An atmo- sphere of tyranny and slavishness hangs over the Dark Continent which is apt to produce degeneration. One of the best possible ways of maintaining a high standard, and preventing men yielding to these temptations to cruelty and oppression, is the knowledge that all such acts will receive the strongest possible censure from English public opinion led by the best elements in the House of Commons. But in order 'that this special form of .public opinion may be respected_:;. and dreaded, it must be wisely and temperately employed. When our soldiers and civil servants in the outlying parts of the Empire see a question like that of the Mandi's remains treated with a rhetoric so loud and so passionate that little more could have been said in condemnation had the Mandi been alive and not dead when the so-called act of mutilation took place, they are not likely to feel very much respect for humanitarian public opinion. They are quick to see that there must be something factitious about an outcry so vehement over the destruction of a corpse that has been buried for ten or twelve years. The man who would be kept in check by a saner and more restrained public opinion and by a reproof which would command the respect of the majority soon grows contemptuous when he witnesses such a fiasco as that of Monday. When he is warned that if he is not more careful in, say, his treatment of natives, and told that he will get into trouble at home, he will now be only too likely to reply Oh, there's no fear of any nonsense of that kind now. They tried it on their hardest over Kitchener, and got a tremendous slap in the face. We need not bother about it any more. They've learnt at home what is the proper way of treating niggers.' Depend upon it, that is the sort of thing which will be said after Mr. Morley's most lamentable identification of the humanitarian cause with his protest against the destruction of the Mandi's remains. Yet, as we have said before, there never was a time when it was more necessary to encourage a strong and healthy public opinion in regard to the oppression of the inferior races. If Mr. Morley had wanted a really good text on which to preach a true humanitarian sermon, he could have found one years ago in the treatment of the natives in the dominions of the Chartered Company. We do not refer to what happened after the insurrection, for one must make great allowance for men who have seen their women and children killed, or even in danger, but to the treatment of the natives before the insurrection. There was oppression and cruelty and callousness of a kind which might far more properly have been used to arouse public opinion on the side of humanity than the question whether the Mandi's bones ought or ought not to have been disinterred. Yet we do not remember Mr. Morley bringing the matter before Parliament or trying to stir up public feeling against the administration of the Chartered Company. He may have made allusions to the subject, but he certainly did not throw himself heart and soul into the cause in the way in which he has done in the case of the Mandi's remains. His rhetoric and his moral indignation were, that is, not used in the good cause, but were kept for what is a matter of taste rather than a matter of essential interest to the good name of England.
Let us, for fear that we have not made ourselves perfectly clear, set forth once more what is our exact position on the whole subject. We hold that Parliament and English public opinion cannot be too vigilant, and cannot inquire too closely into any charge of cruelty and oppression made against our officers, whatever their services, and whatever their status, and we hold also that no censure can be too strong, or punishment too severe, if they have forgotten the honour of England, and sullied her good name by ill- treatment of natives. But the more we feel this the greater is our anxiety that public indignation should not be invoked, and our officers harried and accused, unless there is good and sufficient ground. We do not mean, of course, by this that no inquiries should be made or discussion allowed unless it is certain that wrong has been done. That might shield the guilty. A reasonable and honest suspicion is, we admit, sufficient ground for Parliamentary inquiry and debate, for it is necessary to our political health that Parliamentary debate should be free and untrammelled. But what is essential is that the things complained of should be real crimes and real acts of cruelty, and not acts of the kind attributed to Lord Kitchener,— acts which at the very worst were faults of taste and of want of political insight rather than actual crimes. What we want to teach our soldiers, our civil officers, and our frontiermen generally, is that no real acts of wrongdoing will be forgiven or forgotten. But in order to teach them this effectually we must also make them feel that they will not be followed with a hunt of obloquy if, in doing what they believe to be their duty, they may make honest blunders, either in taste or in political in- sight. Nothing could be more demoralising to our officers - than to give them the impression that whatever they do they are certain to be attacked by our humanitarians, and that, therefore, they need not be too particular ;—to make them believe, in fact, that the humanitarian people in. England think that there is little or no difference between torturing a live native and destroying the remains of one who has been dead ten years. Once establish that idea in men's minds and you will be sure to demoralise them. Depend upon it, an Englishman inspired with the belief that whatever be does he will be misunderstood and abused, and that it is not worth while, therefore, to bother himself too much as to conduct, will not be likely to prove a good servant of the State. After all, men are very like boys, and we all know the type of boy who is so much nagged at at home for little things that he feels it is not worth while to keep straight in the big things of life.
Before we leave the subject we would say one personal word as to Lord Kitchener. It appears to us that one of the best things about the Nile Campaign was the fact that, in spite of the immense difficulty of controlling an army composed for the most part of native regiments with a very small proportion of British officers, the Com- mander-in-Chief managed to keep his troops well in hand and to prevent any serious acts of cruelty. It was no Mean achievement to use so many native troops and yet to have so small a record of misdoing. Yet the result of Mr. Morley's action is that Lord Kitchener, instead of receiving the praise he deserves for his handling of the native troops, has been pilloried as a callous and barbarous soldier. If in the future English Generals were to think less of the living and more of the tombs of dead saints, Mr. Morley might well be regarded as the cause of such an attitude of mind. But fortunately we do not think that there is really any fear of their taking so cynical an attitude. An English General, after all, is not a creature of a different species, but a man quite as anxious to show pity and to stop cruelty as any civilian with whom he can be matched. Fighting ought, according to theory, to make men brutal and callous. As a matter of fact, it does nothing of the kind. The men most callous to human suffering of whom history tells us, the men of the Terror, were almost all civilians.
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