BOOKS.

MR. CHURCHILL'S EAST AFRICAN JOURNEY.* IT would be just to say of Mr. Churchill's book that it is capital, and in places brilliant, journalism. It has all the • My African Journey. By the Bight Hon. Winston Spencer Churchill, M.P. With el Illustrations from Photographs by the Author and Lieutenant- Colonel Gordon Wilson, and 9 Maya. London Hodder and Stoughton. fee. net.]

touches, and all the graces that are possible in the circum- stances, of the man who knows how to keep his readers thoroughly entertained although he writes in a hurry. We miss here for the most part the swinging and balanced

sentences which made critics say that the young author of With the Malakand Field Force had the Gibbonian style; but the quick eye for everything picturesque and vivid is

as keen as ever, and apparently the resounding phrase, even if it is delivered in a less formal and studied setting, comes into Mr. Churchill's mind as easily as more workaday collo- cations into the minds of others. Sometimes he overweights slight incidents with a certain grandiosity, but, to say the least, it is interesting to find that the youngest Cabinet Minister harks back without embarrassment to the rotundity of manner which was supposed to have ended with Mr. Gladstone. And although Mr. Churchill may sometimes sacrifice plainness of meaning to rhetoric, he is always able to laugh at himself in a way which we find engaging. For example, he describes his meeting with a young Englishman (they are all "young gentlemen" or "young English gentlemen") who was directing tree-felling in the forest.

The question of labour-saving appliances arose, and Mr. Churchill says : "On this we talked—or at least I talked— while we scrambled across the stumps of fallen trees." We are quite sure that is true. What we have said is only a confirma-

tion of the exactness of Mr. Churchill's own claims. "I view these letters," he says, "with a modest eye"; but he hopes thby will serve "for the formation of opinion, for the

stirring and enlivenment of thought, and for the discernment of colour and proportion." We can guarantee that they will. When Mr. Churchill is modest he is irresistible, and we prefer to attribute to any one rather than to the author all that in the illustrations and "get-up" of this book is inconsistent with modesty.

We very much doubt, however, whether it is desirable for Cabinet Ministers to publish magazine articles and books arising directly out of their work during their term of office. There are many ways in which the practice might be detri- mental to the public service. Suppose that a Cabinet Minister had laid himself under special obligations to leading persons in a Colony in collecting material for his work, be would have set himself an unnecessarily difficult and invidious task if it became his duty as a, member of the Government subse- quently to attack the administration for which those persons were responsible. There would be the same difficulty if he committed himself vehemently to any policy which events

afterwards proved to be unsound; his amour propre would conflict with his duty to the State. Possibly no Nemesis of

this kind will overtake Mr. Churchill; but what we have heard lately about the administration of British East

Africa does not dispose us to hold it an advantage that be should have bestowed, after an inevitably slender inquiry,

the following general blessing on the work of the District Commissioners :—

" The African protectorates now administered by the Colonial Office afford rare scope for the abilities of earnest and intelligent youth. A man of twenty-five may easily find himself ruling a large tract of country and a numerous population. The Govern- ment is too newly established to have developed the highly centralised and closely knit—perhaps too closely knit—hierarchy and control of the Indian system. It is far too poor to afford a complete Administration. The District Commissioner must judge for himself, and be judged upon his actions. Very often—for tropical diseases make many gaps in the ranks, and men must often return to England to recruit their health—the officer is not a District Commissioner at all, but a junior acting in his stead or in some one's stead, sometimes for a year or more. To him there come day by day the natives of the district with all their troubles, disputes, and intrigues. Their growing appreciation of the impartial justice of the tribunal loads them increasingly to carry all sorts of cases to the District Commissioner's Court. When they are ill they come and ask for medicine. When they are wounded in their quarrels it is to the white man they go to have the injuries dressed. Disease and accident have to be combated without professional skill. Courts of justice and forms of legality must be maintained without lawyers. Taxes have to be collected by personal influence. Peace has to be kept with only a shadow of force. All these great opportunities of high service, and many others, are often and daily placed within the reach of men in their twenties—on the whole with admirable results. It was most pleasant to hear with what comprehension and sympathy the officers of the East Africa Protectorate speak about their work ; and how they regard themselves as the guardians of native interests and native rights against those who only care about exploiting the country and its people."

Mr. Churchill adds r--." There are more than four million aboriginals in East Africa alone. Their care imposesa grave, and I think an inalienable, responsibility upon the: British Government," That is well and -truly said; but we know now

that that responsibility is not safe in the hands of very much underpaid administrators. .

In Nairobi every white man.is a politician, and "most of them are leaders of parties." Mr. Churchill says :—

" One would scarcely believe it possible that a centre so new should be able to develop BQ many divergent and conflicting interests, or that a community so small should be able to give to each such vigorous and even vehement expression. There are already In miniature all the elements of keen political and racial discord, all the materials for hot, and acrimonious debate. The white man versus the black; the Indian versus both ; the settler as against the planter; the town contrasted with the country ; the official class against the unofficial ; the coast and the high- lands ; the railway administration and the Protectorate generally; the Ring's African Rifles and the East Africa Protectorate Police ; all these different points of view, naturally arising, honestly adopted, tenaciously held, and not yet reconciled into any harmonious general conception, confront the visitor in perplexing disarray."

Mr. Churchill seizes the opportunity to discuss the ethics of the" white man's country" movement, and proposes tentatively

that the highlands of East Africa might be populated by white men, and the distinctively tropical districts by British Indians as well as the aboriginals. Indians have been settled in East Africa

for generations, and he who would turn them out would indeed construe drastically the principles of "a white man's country." In any case, the phrase cannot have any strict meaning so long as there are millions of aboriginals. The worst politician

in Nairobi does not propose, we are sure, that the history of Tasmania should be repeated in East Africa. Mr. Churchill

assumes that the aboriginals, now that their tribal wars are ended, will multiply. Much depends upon the degree in which they adopt civilisation. Civilisation, we fear, too often means a weakening of the hard old fibre; the stock becomes a prey to ills which were unknown before the coming of the White man, or against which it would once have been proof. Thus the Maori, most attractive and intelligent of native races, have suffered a notable depreciation of their repro- ductive power, and a higher mortality, since the white man colonised New Zealand, and this in spite of all his care for them. The' latest figures show that the Maori are not actually dwindling as was supposed till recently, but the principle remains too true.

The Contrast between the entrancing beauty of East Africa and Uganda and the mysterious and deadly sicknesses which blight and consume away men and animals is excellently drawn. That certainly "stirs," if it does not enliven, one's spirits. We were particularly interested by Mr. Churchill's assertion—fortified by experience—that a bicycle is the best means of transport on the forest tracks. The officers use them freely, and we have no doubt that the native troops will be mounted on them before long in districts where horses and mules cannot survive the attacks of the tsetse-fly. We must give as a last quotation the best piece of rhetoric in the book :—

" The forests of Uganda, for magnificence, for variety of form and colour, for profusion of brilliant life—plant, bird, insect, reptile, beast—for the vast scale and awful fecundity of the natural processes that are beheld at work, eclipsed, and indeed effaced, all previous impressions. One becomes, not without a secret sense of aversion, the spectator of an intense convulsion of life and death. Reproduction and decay are locked struggling in infinite embraces. In this glittering equatorial slum huge trees jostle one another for room to live; slender growths stretch upwards—as it seems in agony—towards sunlight and life. The soil bursts with irrepressible vegetations. Every victor, trampling on the rotting mould of exterminated antagonists, soars aloft only to encounter another host of aerial rivals, to be burdened with masses of parasitic foliage, smothered in the glorious blossoms of creepers, laced and bound and interwoven with interminable tangles of vines and trailers. Birds are as bright as butterflies ; butterflies are as big as birds. The air hums with flying creatures ; the earth crawls beneath your foot. The telegraph- wire runs northward to Gondokoro through this vegetable labyrinth. Even its poles had broken into bud !"

Mr. Churchill's last word. of advice to his countrymen is to concentrate their attention on Uganda, with its inestimable riches and its steady and docile population. Other pro- tectorates may be left more or less alone till that has been developed. It is, indeed, wonderful to think that we can travel now in comfortable trains and steamers the whole way from Mombasa to Alexandria, except between Jinja and Gondokoro.Only ten years ago the Dervish power was

still broadly and solidly established across the track. He will be an incurably stay-at-home reader of. this book who does not wish to follow Mr. Churchill's route.