OUR BLACK TROOPS.
WE cannot altogether agree with that splendid soldier, Sir James Willcocks, in the central thought of his speech of Friday week. He congratulated the country, in striking language, on the fact that the Ashanti Cam- paign was fought to a most successful issue by " black " troops alone. There were no "Queen's men," only West Africans, East Africans, and Sikhs. [May we remark en passant that, although, as all Indians call themselves "black," there is no affront to them in the use of the term, there are no really black people in India ? The Sikhs, in particular, whom Sir J. Willcocks so greatly admired, emigrated from Rajpootana, are of half-Aryan blood, and are often as fair as pure-blooded Arabs, who are hardly darker than their Hebrew cousins.] The English may, we admit, be justly proud of their wonderful success in trusting, training, and leading men of the brown, the :yellow, and the black races—though Bussy made fine Sepoy regiments, the French have turned the Senegalese into good fighters, and the Russians trust their Cossacks, who are Tartars, without reserve—but that pride should not induce them to forget the first maxims of empire. Our coloured auxiliaries are invalu- able, but our sovereignty is built, like that of the Roman, on the white legionary. There is a tendency just now, which we should very greatly regret to see encouraged, to rely on the auxiliaries too much, and even to increase their proportion to our own kinsfolk. The Indian soldier is an excellent fighting man, brave as any- body, fully susceptible of discipline, and capable when so disciplined and in the mood of rare devotion to his officers, but still he is an Asiatic, with an Asiatic mind and heart, and in 1857 he made a leap for empire. All Indians are liable to emotions which we can never trace, to superstitions which are to us fathomless, and to feel obligations to each other which we are unable to discern. No white man will ever comprehend fully why Brahmin soldiers should have struck for the house of Timour, why after the experience of a hundred years &Toys should have believed that we wished to trick them into Christi- anity, or why a regiment stationed far down the Gulf of Bengal should, when the general movement was fizzling out, have felt itself compelled by its " honour " to rise in belated revolt, and be destroyed. We have always to remember when we employ dark soldiers that this liability exists. The Indians are not mercenaries, being to a man born subjects of his Majesty ; they deserve all honour for their soldier-like qualities ; and they ought not, in the judgment of the present writer, to be shut out as they are from command in their own regiments, especially cavalry; but we ought never to forget and to provide for the ultimate risk. We should trust them always, but never be dependent upon them, even in campaigns such as that we are now waging in China. In the case. of the really black troops foresight is even more required. They are to a. recruiting sergeant the most tempting of recruits. The majority of the black races, whether on the Nile, or in West Africa, or in East Africa, or in South Africa, are splendidly brave, they can live where Europeans die—which is not quite true of the S khs, who eat civilised food—and they display very often, as recently in the Soudan, a disposition to trust and "take to" their white officers. They have, nevertheless, savagery latent in their blood, they are a prey to un- accountable superstitions, and they are possessed with a demon of vanity, from which some cause or other, probably superior brain, has delivered the lndia.n races. We might on any given day, for no reason intelligible to Europeans, be faced by our black soldiery, probably, it is true, at a convenient moment—even the Sepoys, who had clear brains among them, did not wait for a war—but possibly also at a most inconvenient one. Our statesmen are bound to remember that possibility, and not to make of the readiness to serve displayed by dark men and black men, or their undoubted qualities as soldiers, an excuse for not keeping our white army strong. England must not become a Carthage, or rather an inferior Car- thage, for the evil millionaires who ruled the great African State had a resource which we have not. A large propor- tion, probably even two-thirds, of the soldiers to whom Hannibal's genius gave renown were Spaniards, and as white as the Italians they defied. The French-Canadians are the only white soldiers in our Service not of our own immediate strain.
But we shall be told we cannot waste our people in tropical swamps ; and what are we to do ? Just what we do in India,—use the service of dark men to the uttermost, but keep the proportion between them and the white soldiers fixed and immutable. It is very doubtful whether, if we compel a reasonable temperance and build our tropical barracks on arches with free ventilation, give every. man quinine in his porter. and supply valid mosquito curtains, our men would suffer in the tropics more than natives do. White men plough in Florida and the valleys of Central America, and go foraging about in the hot regions of Brazil after all manner of work. West Africa is the only division of the world which seems to be fatal to the white man, and it is still to be ascertained whether his special liability to death on that coast extends to the interior, and whether it cannot be removed by sanitary laws, especially the great one which gives health to the Burmese, the necessity of a clear eight feet of open air beneath the sleeping rooms. If we allowed the filth which collects in a West African settlement to collect in a London suburb which was supplied with African water, we should have an epidemic there every July. Mr. Cham- b,rlain sees the truth dimly, and is sending out a scientific Commission of Inquiry, which will, we hope, not despise the evidence of shrewd natives ; but he must do another thing besides, ask Parliament for a small sanitary loan, and with it construct a European quarter in every station where he wants many Europeans to live. Hong-kong doctors will tell him bow to do it, or any of the doctors who have made Rangoon as safe for Europeans as for Burmese. We rather despise the French for building cities the moment they settle, but they have to make exile endurable to men who dread malaria and crave to be at home, and their way is not so hopelessly unreasonable as it looks. With those improvements, two or three hos- pital ships, and biennial reliefs, even absent-minded Atkins should be healthy, and, at all events, we must risk it if our dominion is not to depend on the fidelity of soldiers the bottom of whose hearts we are unable to P- robe There will be expense, no doubt, and a good deal of it, but our great tropical possessions will ultimately maintain themselves, and Empires cannot be safely con- structed "on the cheap."
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