While we were eating and parleying with the Khan there arrived on the scene a mounted Kikuyu chief, with chair, umbrella, khaki helmet, and other insignia, and attended by about a hundred warriors in full feather. In order to show their respect they began at once their war-dance, and we left them a quarter of an hour later still circling and hopping to and fro with quivering spears and nodding plumes to their monotonous chorus, while the white-robed Swahilis stood gravely by and bade us farewell in the dignified manners of the East. I reflected upon the interval that separates these two races from each other, and on the centuries of struggle that the advance had cost, and I wondered whether that interval was wider and deeper than that which divides the modern European from them both; but without arriving at any sure conclusion.
Our journey to Embo had been so delightful that I was not inclined to hanker after rejected alternatives. But when we drove in to the Thika camp as the sun was setting, tired out by fifty miles of road, the first spectacle which saluted my eyes was a lion's skin spread out upon the ground and Colonel Wilson engaged in sprinkling it with arsenical powder. Then we were told the tale, which in brief was that they were driving a long reed-bed, when the lion sprang out and ran obliquely across the line of beaters. Wilson fired and the lion bounded back into the reeds, whence stones, fires, shoutings, shots, and all other disturbances failed to move him. Whereupon, after two hours, being impatient and venturesome, they had marched in upon him shoulder to shoulder, to find him, fortunately, quite dead.
My friends endeavoured to console me by the news that lions had now been heard of in two other places, and that we should be sure to find one in the morning; and next day, after we had driven three miles of reeds, it seemed that their hopes were well founded, for a large animal of some kind could be seen moving swiftly to and fro under cover, and every one declared this must be the lion. At last only one more patch of reeds remained to beat, and we took up our positions, finger on trigger, about sixty yards from the farther edge of it, while the beaters, raising an astonishing tumult with yells and the beating of tin cans, plunged boldly in. Parturiunt montes—out rushed two enormous wart-hogs. Let no one reproach the courage of the pig. These great fierce boars, driven from their last shelter, charged out in gallant style—tusks gleaming, tails perpendicular—and met a fate prepared for a king. With these and another which we galloped down and pistolled on the way home I had to be content, and can now, so far as I am concerned, sadly write, in the expressive words of Reuter, "No lions were 'bagged.'"
CHAPTER III
THE HIGHLANDS OF EAST AFRICA
"Colour" is already the dominant question at Nairobi. "We mean to make East Africa a white man's country," cries, in strident tones, the Colonists' Association on every occasion. Truly a respectable and impressive policy; but one which seems, at first sight, rather difficult to achieve in a land where there are, so far, fewer than two thousand five hundred whites and more than four million black aboriginals. Can East Africa ever become a white man's country? Can even the Highlands, with their cool and buoyant breezes and temperate, unchanging climate, become a white man's country? Never, certainly, in the sense that Canada, or, indeed, the United Kingdom, are white men's countries—that is to say, countries inhabited wholly by white people and subsisting upon an economic basis of white unskilled labour.
It is scarcely worth while even to imagine the Highlands of East Africa denuded of their native inhabitants and occupied solely by Europeans. Such an idea is utterly impossible. Whatever may be the increase in the white population in the future, it is safe to say that it will be far more than counter-balanced by the multiplication of the natives, as they are guarded against famine and prevented from civil war. But were such a solution possible, it would be almost the last thing in the world desired by those who clamour for "a white man's country." For observe it is not against the black aboriginal that the prejudices and interests of the white settler or trader are arrayed. The African, it is conceded, is welcome to stay in his own country. No economic competition has yet arisen or is likely to arise between him and the new-comers. Their spheres of activity lie wholly apart, for the white man absolutely refuses to do black man's work; not for that harsh toil does he exile himself from the land of his birth; while the native could not, in his present state of development, displace the white man in skilled employments and the superintendence and the organization of industry—even if he would—and nothing is farther from his ambitions.
It is the brown man who is the rival. The European has neither the wish nor the power to constitute a white proletariat in countries like East Africa. In his view the blacks should be the private soldiers of the army, but the non-commissioned officers and the commanders must be white. This should not be dismissed as a mere assertion of racial arrogance. It is an obstinate fact. It is already a grave defect for a community to found itself upon the manual labour of an inferior race, and many are the complications and perils that spring therefrom. But what of the second storey? If there is to be any kind of white society dwelling together year after year within the standards of life and comfort to which Europeans have universally been accustomed to aspire, and largely to attain, this middle stage in the economic system must provide that white society with the means of earning—as professional men, as planters, merchants, traders, farmers, bankers, overseers, contractors, builders, engineers, accountants, clerks—a living for themselves and their families. And here strikes in the Asiatic. In every single employment of this class, his power of subsisting upon a few shillings a month, his industry, his thrift, his sharp business aptitudes give him the economic superiority, and if economic superiority is to be the final rule—as it has never been and never will be in the history of the world—there is not a single employment of this middle class, from which he will not, to a very large extent, clear the white man, as surely and as remorselessly as the brown rat extirpated the black from British soil.
Then what remains? What sort of social organizations shall we be building up with so much thought and labour in these new lands under the British Crown? There is already no white working class. There is to be no white middle class. Room is left only for the capitalist pure and simple—if one may so describe him. A vast army of African labourers, officered by educated Indians or Chinese, and directed by a few individuals of diverse nationalities employing cosmopolitan capital—that is the nightmare which haunts the white population of South Africa, and at which what there is of a white population in East Africa is already shrieking vigorously.
Yet hear the other side. How stands the claim of the British Indian? His rights as a human being, his rights as a British subject, are equally engaged. It was the Sikh soldier who bore an honourable part in the conquest and pacification of these East African countries. It is the Indian trader who, penetrating and maintaining himself in all sorts of places to which no white man would go or in which no white man could earn a living, has more than any one else developed the early beginnings of trade and opened up the first slender means of communication. It was by Indian labour that the one vital railway on which everything else depends was constructed. It is the Indian banker who supplies perhaps the larger part of the capital yet available for business and enterprise, and to whom the white settlers have not hesitated to recur for financial aid. The Indian was here long before the first British official. He may point to as many generations of useful industry on the coast and inland as the white settlers—especially the most recently-arrived contingents from South Africa (the loudest against him of all)—can count years of residence. Is it possible for any Government with a scrap of respect for honest dealing between man and man, to embark upon a policy of deliberately squeezing out the native of India from regions in which he has established himself under every security of public faith? Most of all must we ask, is such a policy possible to the Government which bears sway over three hundred millions of our Indian Empire?
We are in presence of one of those apparently hopeless antagonisms of interests which baffle and dispirit all who are concerned in their adjustment. And these questions are not confined to East Africa or to South Africa. A whole series of new problems has arisen, and will grow graver and larger as the immediate history of the British Empire unfolds. They erect themselves upon a field almost wholly unstudied, and familiar only by the prejudices which in every direction obstruct movement and view. The entry of the Asiatic as labourer, trader, and capitalist into competition in industry and enterprise not only with, but in, the Western world is a new fact of first importance. Cheap, swift, easy means of communication, the establishment of peace and order over land and sea, the ever-growing inter-dependence of all men and all countries upon one another, have given wings to Asiatic commercial ambition and rendered Asiatic manual labour fluid, as it has never before been fluid since the beginning of things.