Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/73

 of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Herr Schlettwein, a Government representative on the Reichstag's Colonial Budget Committee, delivered himself in 1904 of an essay on the principles of Colonial policy, in the course of which he says, after sundry scoffing allusions to "exaggerated humanitarianism, vague idealism, and irrational sentimentality":

The Blue Book must, however, be read with a sense of perspective. It is more in the nature of a "War Aims" publication than a sober, historical narrative, and has been compiled for a perfectly obvious purpose. The reader is left in entire ignorance of the fact that, as Sir Harry Johnston wrote in 1913, referring to this and other German Colonial scandals, "Germany wisely did not hush up these affairs, but investigated them in open court and punished the guilty." There is no mention of von Trotha's proclamations—which, by the way, are misquoted—being annulled by the German Government. Von Trotha's recall is only referred to incidentally. The barest reference is made to the massacre of many German settlers and the destruction of homesteads; and nothing at all of the heavy losses of the Germans, amounting to 90 officers and 1,321 men killed by wounds and disease, and 89 officers and 818 men wounded, a very considerable total for an African campaign of this kind, showing that the Hereros were by no means so helpless and defenceless as the reader would be led to believe. Neither is there the slightest reason to doubt the perpetration in German South West Africa of many hideous individual outrages, floggings, murder, rape and all the concomitants of unbridled passion which have disgraced the records of the White invaders of colonisable South Africa. But an impartial judgment will not accept without mental reservation the depositions of witnesses testifying to such acts years after the event, especially when the circumstances under which their testimony was obtained is borne in mind. Without minimising in the slightest degree the action of the Germans in South West Africa, we should do well to have at the back of our minds the sort of