Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/222

 A Europe desiring to deal justly towards its African wards will have increasingly to bear in mind that there can be no common definition of progress, no common standard for all mankind; that the highest human attainments are not necessarily reached on parallel lines; that man's place and part in the universe around him must vary with dissimilarities in race and in environment; that what may spell advance for some races at a particular stage in their evolution, may involve retrogression if not destruction for other races in another stage; that humanity cannot be legislated for as though every section of it were modelled upon the same pattern; that to disregard profound divergences in culture and racial necessities is to court disaster, and that to encourage national growth to develop on natural lines and the unfolding of the mental processes by gradual steps is the only method by which the exercise of the imperial prerogative is morally justified.

The foregoing remarks apply to regions of Africa where the white man cannot himself occupy and people the soil with his own race. An entirely different set of problems arises where, in the colonisable and semi-colonisable areas, the white man has destroyed, or partially destroyed, native authority and polity and introduced his own economic, political and educational systems. Egypt, Algeria, the Union of South Africa, present as many instances of the latter kind of problem. Widely removed as are its several manifestations in these parts of the Continent, two main issues are in each case involved. The political system introduced from outside must be fairly representative of the governed, and the economic system must provide for the protection and the security of the aboriginal wage-earner. In other words, the European systems implanted in Africa cannot henceforth divest themselves in Africa of the elements which are bound up with their prevalence in Europe. And this, because they must tend to reproduce in Africa broadly the same conditions which they have created in Europe. To imagine that European political and economic systems can be set up in Africa and applied to the government of Africans without giving rise, sooner or later, to the same demands as are made upon the government of Europeans in Europe is to imagine a vain thing. If, for instance, you substitute for indigenous forms of