[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR] SIR, — Mrs . Elspeth Huxley begins
one paragraph by conceding that I should " be the first to agree that we arc not developing our East African territories as we might," which is an admission that I have been critical—constructively so, I hope—but at the end of that same paragraph she declines to share my supposed belief that, " except for a few human failings, all is for the best in the best of all possible British Colonial worlds." That is the clearest charge of complacency, to which I plead " not guilty," and which, I suggest, accords ill with the earlier admission that my policy has been critical. Inci- dentally, I have never expressed any such belief as that debited to me—though I have said, and say again, that, allowing for not discreditable human weaknesses and the manifest imperfections of the system which they operate, I believe the British Colonial system to be the best in the world.
For years I have been pleading for the creation of a special African Branch of the British Colonial Service, and although the idea has been supported by many of the best officials in Africa, there was practically no endorsement of it in this country until Lord Hailey blessed the proposal in his recently published " African Survey."
If those who hanker after an internationalised administration in tropical Africa—which so great and liberal an authority as Lord Lugard has dismissed as fantastic—would urge the creation of a British African Service, a much less difficult and much more promising project to bring into successful operation, they would, I have no doubt, be rendering far better service to Africa.
The root of our disagreement is presumably that your original contributor and then Mrs. Huxley advocated inter- nationalisation with the object of satisfying German colonial clamour, while I persist in regarding the first _c.onsideration as the welfare of Africa and its inhabitants, European, Indian and African, and the second consideration the preservation of the British Empire and the peace of the world.
It would not be fair to trespass further on your space, on which this correspondence has already made heavy demands.—
Editor.
East Africa and Rhodesia,9t Great Titchfidd Street, W. r.
[We cannot continue this correspondence.—En. The Spectator.]
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