_Circumstances alter Cases_
Had the rescue of the native tribes of Puto-Congo from the squeezing
embrace of modern industrialism and its absentee shareholders been a
fairy-tale, they would have remained a happy people without a history,
and here at least no more would have been heard of them. But this being
the real story, things went otherwise.
It is true that Native Industries Limited not only became itself a
reformed character, but managed, by its control of the river routes
and depots, to impose repentance on the great Puto-Congo Combine also.
There, too, a rout was made of the old Board of Directors, and the
missionary zeal of Free Evangelicalism, with an admixture of True
Belief, held the balance of power. In the first year shares went down
at a run from a thirty to a ten per cent dividend, and the mortality of
indentured labour was reduced in about the same proportion.
Of course the shareholders grumbled--not at the reduced death-rate
in itself, but at the awkward parallel which its proportional
fall suggested between toll of life and that other toll of a more
marketable kind which mainly concerned them. It was not pleasant to
feel that a reduced ten per cent profit was always going to be the
condition of a reduced ten per cent death-rate: that fifteen per cent
of the one would cause fifteen per cent of the other, and that, by
implication, a life-saving of five per cent might be effected if the
chastened shareholders would stay languidly content with a five per
cent profit. Mr. Trimblerigg himself felt this to be a reflection
upon the reformation he had effected. He had practically promised the
shareholders that decent treatment of the natives would eventually
bring larger profits. He was annoyed that it had not done so, and was
already taking steps to secure more co-ordination and efficiency in the
combined companies when the war supervened and gave to the relations of
the brother races, white and black, a different complexion.
To put it quite plainly, under war-conditions so far-reaching as to
affect the whole world, humanitarian principles had to take second
place. For the white race, or tribe, or group of tribes in which Mr.
Trimblerigg found himself embraced by birth and moral training was now
saving the world not only for private enterprise and democracy, but
for the black and the brown and the yellow races as well, all round
the globe and back again from San Francisco to Valparaiso. And so the
enlistment of the black races in the cause of freedom--even with a
little compulsion--became an absolute necessity, a spiritual as well as
a military one, and unfortunately the blacks--and more especially the
blacks of Puto-Congo--did not see it in that light of an evangelizing
civilization as the whites did. They did not know what freedom really
was: how could they, having no politics? Their idea of freedom was to
run about naked, to live rent-free in huts of their own building on
land that belonged to nobody, to put in two hours’ work a week instead
of ten hours a day, and when an enemy was so craven as to let himself
be captured alive to plant him head-downwards in the earth from which
he ought never to have come. That was their view of freedom, and I
could name sections of civilized communities holding very similar views
though with a difference.
Slavery, on the other hand, was having to wear anything except beads,
and nose-rings, and imitation silk-hats made of oilskin, having to
work regularly to order for a fixed wage, and to pay a hut-tax for
the upkeep of a machine-like system of government, for which they had
no wish and in which they saw no sense. And that being so, it really
did not matter whether the power which imposed these regulations was
benevolent in its intentions or merely rapacious, whether it secured
them by blood, or blockade, or by bribing the tribal chiefs (which was
the Free Evangelical method) to get the thing done in native ways of
their own. They did not like it.
Puto-Congo, having sampled it for twenty years, had definitely decided
that civilization was bad for it; and when, under the evangelizing
zeal of Mr. Trimblerigg and his co-religionists, civilization
modified its methods, they beat their drums for joy and believing
that civilization was at last letting them go, ran off into the woods
to play. And though, here and there, their chiefs hauled them back
again and made them do brief spells of work at certain seasons of the
year, they regarded it rather as a cleaning-up process, preparatory
to leave-taking, than as a carrying on of the old system under a new
form; and so they continued to play in the woods and revert to happy
savagery, and especially to that complete nudity of both sexes which
the missionaries so strongly disapproved.
It was that holiday feeling, coming after the bad time they had been
through under the old system--a holiday feeling which even the chiefs,
stimulated by bribes, could not control--which did the mischief; for
it came inopportunely just at the time when, five thousand miles away,
civilization had become imperilled by causes with which the Puto-Congo
natives had nothing whatever to do. If civilization was so imperilled
all the better for them.
It was all very unfortunate: for while the fact that civilization
was at war did not make civilization more valuable to the natives of
Puto-Congo, it did make the natives and their trade-produce very much
more valuable to civilization. Quite half-a-dozen things which they
had unwillingly produced under forced labour in the past--rubber was
one--had now become military necessities. It was no longer a mere
question of profits for shareholders--civilization itself was at
stake. Production had suddenly to be brought back to the thirty per
cent standard; and that holiday feeling, so natural but so untimely in
its incidence, was badly in the way. And so powers were given (which
are not usually given to commercial concerns--though sometimes taken)
and under government authority--a good deal at the instigation of Mr.
Trimblerigg--the Puto-Congo Combine became exalted and enlarged into
the Imperial Chartered Ray River Territory Company, which was in fact
a provisional government with powers of enlistment civil and military,
of life and death, and the making and administration of whatever laws
might be deemed necessary in an emergency.
Endowed with these high powers, the Directors at home, with every
intention to use them circumspectly and in moderation, instructed their
commissioners accordingly. But when the commissioners got to work
they found, in the face of ‘that holiday feeling,’ that moderation
did not deliver the goods. And since the goods had to be delivered,
lest the world should be lost to democracy, they took advantage of the
censorship which had been established against the promulgation of news
unfavourable to the moral character of their own side, and took the
necessary and effective means to deliver them. And when the profits
once more began to rise, these did not go to the shareholders but to
the Government as a form of war-tribute, and that, of course, made it
morally all right--for the ten per cent shareholders at any rate--since
they knew nothing about it.
And thus, for three or four years, Puto-Congo natives did their bit,
losing their own lives at an ever-increasing death-rate, and saving
democracy which they did not understand, for that other side of the
world which they did not know. They got no war-medals for it and no
promotion; nor were any reports of those particular casualties printed
in the papers. Enough that the holiday feeling went off, and the goods
were delivered. Over the rest, war-conditions and war-legislation drew
a veil, and nothing was said.
And that is why, while war went on, Mr. Trimblerigg and the rest of
the world did not hear of it; or if they heard anything, did not
believe what they heard; for that too is one of the conditions that war
imposes. Truth, then, becomes more relative than ever; which is one
of the reasons why Mr. Trimblerigg was then in his element. But when
the war was sufficiently over for intercommunication to re-establish
itself, and when the skinning of the scapegoat had become a stale
game, and when the hewing of Agag had emphatically not come off, then
Mr. Trimblerigg, and others, began to hear of it. It was the others
that mattered. Mr. Trimblerigg--his war-mind still upon him, and still
suffering from his severe attack of Old Testament--did not believe it;
but the others did, and the others were mainly the most active and
humanitarian section of the Free Evangelicals. Having already expressed
their disapproval of skinning the scapegoat and hewing Agag, even to
the extent of pronouncing against it at their first annual conference
after the war, they now fastened on the recrudescence of ugly rumours
from Puto-Congo and the adjacent territories, and began to hold Mr.
Trimblerigg responsible.
They had at least this much reason upon their side, that Mr.
Trimblerigg was still chairman of the Directors of Native Industries
Limited, and, by right of office, sat upon the administrative council
of the Chartered Company. And when, as the leakage of news became
larger, it seemed that everything he had formerly denounced as an
organized atrocity was being, or had but recently been done on a much
larger scale by his own commissioners, the cry became uncomfortably
loud, and the war-mind, which can manipulate facts to suit its case
while they are suppressed by law, began to find itself in difficulties.
Mr. Trimblerigg, faced by certified facts which he continued to deny
or question, began jumping from the New to the Old Testament and back
again with an agility which confused his traducers but did not convince
them; and the allegiance of the Free Evangelicals became sharply
divided. The reunion of the Free Churches for which Mr. Trimblerigg had
so long been working, already adversely affected by the divergencies of
the war, was now strained to breaking.
On the top of this came the news that the natives of Puto-Congo had
risen in revolt and had begun massacring the missionaries, and Free
Evangelical opinion became more sharply divided than ever--whether to
withdraw the missions and cease to have any further connection with
the Chartered Company, or to send out reinforcements, less spiritual
and more military, adopt the policy of the firm hand, and restore not
liberty but order.
Mr. Trimblerigg then announced that he would do both. To the
Administrative Council he adumbrated a scheme for the gradual
development of the Chartered Company, with its dictatorial powers, into
the Puto-Congo Free State Limited, with a supervised self-government of
its own, mainly native but owing allegiance to the Company on which its
commercial prosperity and development would still have to depend.
Matters were at a crisis, and were rapidly getting worse. Mr.
Trimblerigg had made too great a reputation over Puto-Congo affairs to
risk the loss of it on a mere policy of drift. Something clearly had to
be done, large, spectacular, idealistic in aim, to cover up from view
a record of failure which never ought to have seen the light. Not only
must it be done; it must be done at once, and he was the man to do it.
The Administrative Council was wise in its generation. Without quite
believing in Mr. Trimblerigg’s proposals it gave him a free hand; for
as one of them said: ‘This is a matter over which he cannot afford to
fail. If he does, he is done for. Give him rope enough, he may hang
others, but he won’t hang himself; of that you may be quite sure.’
Without being quite sure, they made the experiment, and Mr.
Trimblerigg, with full powers, went out as High Commissioner of
the Chartered Company to sow the seed, plant the roots, or lay the
foundations of the Puto-Congo Free State Limited. His mission was
twofold--to save the Puto-Congo natives from themselves, and the shares
of the Chartered Company from further depreciation. Incidentally he had
also to save himself.