A look of astonishment and horror overspread the faces of the whole group of politicians. Behind a black man, did you say? Behind!' they exclaimed.

'It's because the negro

'Yes, behind a negro,' was the answer. has been there the longest, they say, but that's neither here nor there, since our American minister has to walk behind him. Now, if we had an ambassador, he would be in line with the other ambassadors, and would walk in front of the negro, who goes with the ministers.'

'Well, there's no use talking any more about it, then,' answered they all. We must get an ambassador as soon as we can!'

Let me repeat that these politicians were Northern Republicans who had made campaign speeches about their 'black brother,' and not Southern Democrats who openly declared that the negro was not their brother, but their inferior, who must be made to keep his place!

When Frederick Douglass, probably the most talented and distinguished mulatto ever known in the United States, was sent to Hayti as the American minister, an American man-of-war was placed at his service. On the voyage the officers of the ship refused to dine with him or fraternise with him. These naval officers-some of them, at least—were Northern Republicans. Frederick Douglass is now dead. Some years before his death he married, in one of the Northern States, an accomplished white woman, who had been a teacher in a prominent school. She, being one of those rare Americans who believe in the equality of the white and black races, saw nothing to hinder, or make repulsive, her union with the great mulatto; but to-day, as his widow, she lives, outside Washington, alone and ostracised. Against the people of her own race she has committed the unpardonable sin, for though in some of the Northern States they have not seen fit to legislate against intermarriage, the prejudice against it is even stronger than in the South, where it is forbidden by law.

Some of the proudest families of Virginia boast of their descent from Pocahontas, the Indian girl who, three centuries ago, married an Englishman. With regard to the aborigines of the land they now call their own the Americans have no feeling of repulsion. A white girl may marry an Indian, or an Indian girl marry a white man, and the Americans say, ' Let them do as they please.'

In England, Americans are surprised to find that there is not this unreasoning (I will not use the word 'unreasonable,' being myself an American) prejudice against the members of the African race. That it might, and probably would, exist had England passed through the same experience as has the United States, and were there here as many blacks, in proportion, as there are in my country, I do not doubt. But under present circumstances a fullblooded negro, a mulatto, or a person with only a small amount of

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African blood, seems to be able to live quite comfortably and happily. I have already related how the heads of English colleges were willing to receive on terms of equality a girl who professed herself to be partly negro. At the Temple a young negro, quite black, is studying for the Bar, and is freely associated with by the English students. Prominent negroes coming from America to England are dined by the English aristocracy. I have heard English people say that our Southern laws forbidding the intermarriage of the black and white races were unjust and discriminating-that a man should be allowed to marry whom he pleased, with the exception of his deceased wife's sister!

6

An incident which happened in my own home first opened my eyes to the fact that in London white English servants and black American servants could not only live together in the same house, but be friends. We had living with us an American negro girl as cook, and we required a housemaid. The cook said she had a 'friend in London who would take the situation.' I took it for granted that the housemaid would be another American negress, and when she came to call I was amazed to find she was an English girl. But are you willing to live in the house with a negro cook?' I asked. Certainly,' was her reply, we are very great friends.' When the white girl took the situation we had prepared a separate bedroom for her, when, to our surprise and horror, she announced that she would share the room with her friend, the cook! She would be lonely by herself! And because servants were scarce and we treasured the American dishes which our black cook supplied to us, we gave a reluctant consent. I will however honestly admit that in any household in my own country such a state of domestic affairs would have caused a scandal in the neighbourhood, while in London, having spoken of the circumstance to English friends, I have actually been asked, 'What of it?'

In large American establishments, like hotels, clubs, &c., black and white servants are sometimes employed, but a distinct line is drawn between them. They live and work in separate parts of the house and eat their food at different tables.

But I am reminded that here in England the negro is a novelty, a curiosity, not a problem, as he is in the United States. If our American negro should emigrate to England, not as an occasional visitor, but in numbers, I am sure that here too there would be found no 'place' for him. Where is his 'place'? That is the question the people of my country are engaged in trying to answer. That is our 'Negro Problem.' We look forward to the time when the negro shall come into his place and inherit his own kingdom, but that kingdom, though it has been sought, has not been found, and the majority of us believe it can never be found within the borders of the United States.

ELIZABETH L. BANKS.

1899

THE SIERRA LEONE DISTURBANCES

SIERRA LEONE is, I am afraid, a name of evil omen in the ears of most Englishmen. Zachary Macaulay was the first white man who ever expressed a real affection for the place, and as far as I know he was also the last. The furthest corners of our colonial empire have been illuminated by Mr. Kipling's genius; but he has always maintained a silence, which he probably considers discreet, as to the existence of Englishmen anywhere between Old Calabar and the Gambia. Miss Kingsley can both appreciate and express the humour of a tropical swamp, and the charms to be found in the society of particularly degraded savages; but unfortunately she has hardly any personal acquaintance with our own colonies. This need not always be so, and the day may come when we shall glow with patriotic pride on recalling the historic associations of the Town Council of Free Town, and take a sentimental interest in tracing out the descendants of Madam Yoko and Bai Bureh. But such a time is not yet; and at present it is possible to quote Sierra Leone as an example of the futility of the most benevolent of human wishes. Founded with infinite pains to afford the negro a chance of showing that he is fit for something better than slavery, some qualified observers have been known to declare that the colony has not achieved this end. Its recent state would certainly have surprised its original founders, who never contemplated the existence of a populous settlement where the free negro on the coast might earn a comfortable fortune on trafficking in the produce of the slave labour in the interior. The reign of pure commercialism, however, is over, whatever may have been its faults, and they were numerous, and its merits, and they were great. For the circumstances of the colony have been radically changed, and, for better or worse, a corresponding change in the government of the colony is inevitable.

The institution of the Protectorate of Sierra Leone in 1896 is the event on which the future history of the colony must depend. The area thus affected is about equal to that of Ireland; its population is supposed to be about a million, more or less; its boundaries have been definitely delimited so far as they march with those of the French, and we need not expect to have any commercial dealings with the regions beyond them, as was formerly the case. The

country so brought under our control is inhabited by natives, many of whom we have taught to trade, but with whose general behaviour we have up to now resolutely refused to interfere. Inter-tribal wars, lasting possibly for three or four years; constant slave-raiding, carried on partly by refugees from French victories over the turbulent Sofas, partly by the indigenous chiefs; trial by ordeal, punishment by torture; levies of goods at the pleasure of the chiefs; the form of 'direct taxation' to which it is seriously proposed that we should now revert; and an organised system of blackmail by the chiefs, based on 'women palavers,' of which the less said the better, were the native institutions which Sir Frederic Cardew, the present Governor, found flourishing on his appointment in 1894. A policy of non-interference with such practices at our gate, that is to say, within twenty miles of Free Town, may have been justified by the inability of the colony to find the money which it would cost to suppress them, though such a plea is not one to be proud of. But now that the colony will, owing to the limitation of the area open to our trade, be ruined if they are not suppressed, the new departure suggested by the late Sir S. Rowe, one of the best administrators the Colonial Office have known in this generation, accepted by Lord Ripon, and now in the course of being carried out by Sir F. Cardew, seems to be fully justified from every point of view. The cardinal points of this policy may be summed up as no fighting; no slave trade; the chiefs to judge natives according to their own law in civil matters, and in all but the most serious charges of crime; and payment by the chiefs of the house-tax. The Protectorate is not in the Queen's dominions, so domestic slavery is not interfered with; native law is to remain as it was, except where it is contrary to right and natural justice, i.e. plainly monstrous, and the chiefs are to be maintained as they are. Such is the policy. The means of carrying it out are to be found in principle in three sections of the Protectorate Ordinance, by which a chief is to do any public act' ordered by the Governor, and no show of force is to be made to any public officer ' in the execution of his duty.' It does not need a lawyer to see what it is proposed to effect. The country is to be governed in certain important respects according to English ideas; but in all other matters the people are to be left alone as much as possible. Government is to be carried on by the chiefs wherever, and in so far as, such government is tolerable; but the white man is to be there, and wherever he sees fit he is to have his way. The justification of our accepting such a responsibility as this implies is to be found in the manner in which we meet it, and in the effects we ultimately produce. It is far too soon yet to judge of the latter. The late Sir D. Chalmers' recent report, Sir F. Cardew's answers to his strictures, and Mr. Chamberlain's judgment between the two enable us to form some opinion as to the former.

The report deals chiefly with the resistance to the house-tax, and the steps taken to overcome it, which, though they involved bloodshed and war on a miniature scale, must be carefully distinguished from the subsequent Mendi rebellion in the south of the Protectorate. This latter event resembled the Indian Mutiny on a far smaller scale, both in the simultaneous outbreak of hostilities over a large tract of country with which it began, and in the murder and pillage to which it led. The only question which Sir D. Chalmers was called on to consider in relation to this part of the disturbances was how far it had been caused by the house-tax, and how far by other events. His report falls naturally under two heads. Firstly, an accusation that the tax was levied by the Commissioners with oppressive severity: secondly, that the tax was unjust, unpolitic, and constituted the main cause of the rebellion.

The first of these accusations is the more shocking to our feelings, so I will deal with it first, though the second is perhaps the more important from a political point of view. The oppression took place chiefly, if it took place at all, in connection with the collection of the house-tax. The chiefs had long had notice that the tax would be demanded, and had made objections to it, as they had to many other matters provided for in the Protectorate Ordinance, but had been told that their wishes in this as in other matters could not be complied with. When the time came for the tax to be collected in the three districts in which, out of the five composing the Protectorate, it had been imposed, the Government seem to have received information, subsequently confirmed by information received by the Commissioners, that many of the chiefs had agreed with one another not to pay the tax themselves, and to do what they could to prevent others paying it. Under these circumstances the Commissioners all seem to have followed the same general plan. The chiefs, and in one case some fifty Sierra Leone traders, were summoned to the chief town in each district, and called on to pay, or at all events to promise to pay. On their refusal the more important of them were arrested, and either sent down in custody to Free Town, or kept in custody where they were. It is chiefly these arrests which produced so unfavourable an opinion in the mind of Sir D. Chalmers. For my part, I do not see how, from the Commissioners' point of view, they could have been avoided. The sections I have referred to seem to me exactly to meet the case. The collection of the tax by the chiefs was a 'public act,' the enforcement of payment of the tax by the Commissioner was certainly an exercise of his duty.' The law officer of the colony held this view, and Sir F. Cardew said that this was the kind of matter to which he intended the section to apply when it was drafted. Sir D. Chalmers maintains that the only remedy for the refusal of a chief to collect the tax was to levy on his goods under