HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF WEST AFRICA.*
IN this account of West Africa, Mr. Lucas has added another volume to his useful and interesting Historical Geo- graphy of the British Colonies, and it is the saddest chapter in the whole history of the British Empire. Over it all still hangs the poisonous malaria of the slave-trade, that will pro- bably take many centuries of civilising sanitation to drive wholly away. Mr. Lucas gives a brief but complete sketch of the history of this baneful trade, which he thinks came "in the natural order of things." He says (p. 76) :— " It is impossible to resist the conclusion that the slave-trade was inevitable, and that it provided the material by which tropical America was devel ved and was colonised, and without which development and colonisation would have been impossible. But such an admission involves no denial of its hideous atrocities, or of the evil which it brought on every country and every people • HistoricaZ Geography of the British Co:onies. Vol. III., West Afrisa. By 0. P. LuLas, B.A... Oxford oiarendoa Press.
which had part and lot in its wickedness and its shame. In America it produced conditions of life which were only partly remedied by nothing short of social revolution, which have left to this day a blight on the lands to which Africans were carried, which have created difficulties of race and colour, of political and social economy, which make the present anxious and the future all uncertain. In Africa it stereotyped savagery, it paralysed industry, it created such monstrosities as the Negro Power of Dahomey, it made the land which Europeans first visited in modern history the darkest and most degraded part of the world. But, worst of all, it tainted and lowered the peoples of Europe, it ran directly counter to freedom, to humanity, to every noble im- pulse of growing races and moving times, and it left a mark of infamy on English history which no chronicler can minimise and no apologist erase."
And there is a heavier consequence still in the burden of responsibility that England now feels towards West Africa, which she dare not shirk, and in the continual bearing of which is the only chance, we think, of ultimately erasing the black "mark of infamy." Peoples, says Mr. Lucas (p. 94),—
" Reap in bitterness what they have sown ; they cannot cancel the past or lightly regenerate scenes of former misrule. For a century and a half the English had taken a foremost place in keeping the West Coast of Africa as a preserve for catching, buying, and selling men. They had discouraged peace and the arts of peace. They had encouraged raiding and war. They had invited the native races to prey on one another ; and though in the end they abolished the slave-trade and reversed their policy, they could not undo the mischief which that policy had wrought. West Africa was left as a dead-weight on their hands, profitless, help- less, wellnigh hopeless, disorganised, demoralised, with its natural barbarism artificially intensified. Eighty years and more have passed since the date of the Abolition Act, English lives have been lost, and English money has been spent in trying to bring peace and order and industry into lands which were taught to know none of these things. Yet the end of it all is that civilisation has made but little way, that industry is hardly more than trade in jungle produce, and that, even in these brighter and healthier days, men sometimes wonder whether the game is worth the candle, whether England gives any real benefit to, or derives any real benefit from, her possessions on the West Coast of Africa."
But Mr. Lucas himself is hardly one of those who wonder whether the game is worth the candle, for he believes that "the law and justice of a Christian people has its effect [though very slowly] among West African natives, and the English would not be justified in withdrawing that law and justice, or in transferring to some other less qualified and less trained European nation the burden which history has given them to bear" (p. 215). Though Mr. Lucas's tone is some- times pessimistic, at heart he seems to believe in the ultimate triumph of good. The truth that losses may be turned into gains was illustrated by some notable instances in his Intro- duction to this Historical Geography, as we pointed out in
noticing that volume (Spectator, November 12th, 1887). England tried to coerce her North American colonies and
lost them ; but "their loss set England free to work in other directions. She looked out for a new field of colonisation, and found it in Australia." Besides, another gain "has followed from this defeat,—England learned thereby the true mode of dealing with colonies." In the present volume Mr. Lucas notices how the disaster of the Franco-German War had a similar effect on the French, and led them to seek expansion "in foreign parts, notably in Africa." Curiously enough, the same war had the same effect, but for opposite reasons, on the victors, and led the Germans to join in the scramble for Africa. As Mr. Lucas puts it (p. 140)—and he is never happier than when he is thus able to sum up by playing one nation, or one event, against another in more or less para- doxical contrasts-
" Consciousness of loss, then, in the case of the French—sense of work done, of union and strength in the case of the Germans— has been a motive force and as one and the other has moved, competition has sprung up, in which other peoples have joined, resulting in a race between nations for the waste places of the world. In Africa, a few years back, these waste places were chiefly to be found."
So the history of Africa in the last twenty years has largely consisted in the making of maps and the marking of boundaries,—not between native tribes, but between Euro- pean spheres of influence. The views of Mr. Lucas on the merits of government by Chartered Companies appear to have undergone some change since he wrote his Introduc-
tion. Then he quoted with apparent approval Adam Smith's verdict, that "the government of an exclusive company of
merchants is perhaps the worst of all governments for any country whatever," and observed that in a company's ." dealings with natives, the idea of governing for the sake of the governed is, as a rule, but faintly present." Now he writes (p. 120) :—
"When a country is uncivilised, a rough-and-ready administra- tion, depending on persons more than on rules, generally works better at the time, and certainly prepares the ground better for the future than a fully organised and strictly scrupulous system, whose principles and regulations have been derived from, and are only fitted to, more advanced communities. There are parts of the world at the present day which probably thrive better under a Chartered Company, or under native rulers advised by British Residents, than if they had been at once con- stituted Crown Colonies."
Apologists for Mr. Rhodes may possibly object to the impli- cations in the above passage that his methods are not scrupulous ; and moralists may object to the theory that less scrupulous methods can ever succeed better than strictly scrupulous ones. Is it not, after all, the apparent economy of the Company system, gained by the neglect of the interests of the governed, that alone has given it a new lease of life ? The British public fears, above most things, the extra penny on the Income-tax, and so is content to leave the dangerous and difficult work of opening up relations with new countries to mere adventurers, although it is well known, or ought to be by this time, that in the end responsibility, moral if not financial, comes home to roost on the English nation. As Mr. Lucas says (p. 115) :—
"Whatever Englishmen do in strange lands, whatever engage- ments they make, whatever responsibilities they incur, all is eventually credited to the British Government. Hence Ministers are driven to accept the inevitable, and often when roundly charged with being aggressive, are, if the truth be known, going forward with heavy hearts, only because greater misery would be caused by turning back."
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