Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/190

 except (where it is agricultural) in the sowing, planting or harvest seasons (which will vary according to the crop) if the wages are sufficiently attractive, the treatment fair, and the period of contract of reasonable length. Given those conditions, a smaller section, dissatisfied with agricultural life under the tribal system, is permanently available. It is the business of government to adjust the demand for labour to the requirements of its wards the native population, whose lasting interests ought never to be sacrificed to the exigencies of an alien interest. After all, there is plenty of time! One of the worst curses of the European industrial system is the absurd degree to which custom and competition combine to press upon the lives of the people. It is really due to nothing more respectable than the hurry of the employing class to get rich—the mad rush for large profits rapidly secured, which flows like a destructive virus through the veins of European capitalist society. There is absolutely no need to transplant this disease into colonisable Africa. It is fatal to all the legitimate and stable utilitarian interests of the country. To allow the native population to suffer from its ravages is for the trustee to violate his trust.

Study the work and the utterances of men like Sir Godfrey Langdon and Lord Selborne (when High Commissioner for South Africa). You will find in them the conception of trusteeship in esse. The test of trusteeship, which is merely good government, i.e., government in the interests of the governed, all the governed, in those parts of Africa which are colonisable, or partly colonisable by white peoples, is the determination of the trustees to provide for the free expansion not only of the white population and their descendants, but of the aboriginal population and their descendants, whose numbers and whose ratio of increase are immeasurably greater. There can be no free expansion for the latter without land: but only helotry. Many hold that where in Africa the white man can permanently reside and perpetuate his race, helotry is the pre-destined and necessary lot of the native. The argument is immoral, and like all immoralities it is unsound, because it looks only to the moment and excludes the future from its purview. In this particular case the error lies in the fact that while it is possible to reduce the native population in these parts of the Continent to helotry by expropriating it from the land, it is impossible