426 AGRICULTURE, COMMERCE, ETC.

be given up as a mudirié. But these are all dreams, and their realisation will not become a necessity until later years, when I have long been dead. Excuse this digression; out of a full heart the mouth speaketh. My position is not an enviable one, as I have already hinted, for our province has received absolutely no support at present. We certainly cannot blame officials who have been left a whole year without supplies if they do their duty reluctantly and ask for their discharge at every opportunity. Since June 15, 1882, the day I left Khartum, until to-day, March 6, 1883, I have received neither letters nor news from there, nor has a steamer been sent up here.

Supposing that the river is blocked again, which I begin to fear is the case—for [ can think of no other explanation of the dilatoriness at Kharttm—would it not then be the duty of the Government to send me news by the Bahr-el-Ghazal, whither steamers have twice been sent? Must I call their conduct towards us negligence? Is it not rather want of consideration? Hitherto my personal influence has kept things in order, and made the Negroes my allies, but I begin to be tired of it, for I see that the Government does not understand us, and never will; and if I retire, things will fall to pieces here in a very short time, and then they will have a nice task before them.

You have heard of the Negro revolts on the Bahr-el-Ghazal ? It seems that the Negroes there have had enough of being regarded only as “things” from which every possible service is to be extorted, and which are then to be maltreated in return © for the work they have done. After many years’ experience of the Negroes, and intimacy with them, I have really no hopes at all of a regeneration of Negroes by Negroes—I know my own men too well for that—nor have I yet been able to bring myself to believe in the hazy sentimentalism which attempts the conversion and blessing of the Negroes by translations of the New Testament and by “ moral pocket-handkerchiefs” alone; but I do not on that account despair of the accomplishment of our task, viz., the opening up and consequent civilisation of the African continent. It will no doubt be a work of time, and whoever devotes himself to the task must from the first give up all thoughts of fame and of his services being acknowledged.