JUSTICE AND THE AFRICAN The Powers of Europe—and Great Britain in particular—boast of the “justice” with which they treat native races. Happily the native tribes, as a whole, fully share this complacent belief in European rule, and this no doubt arises from the fact that before the Powers of Europe divided Central Africa between them, justice, as compared with might, had but a small place. This belief, however, is perceptibly passing away, and in many of the West African colonies the natives are not now prepared to accept, without question, the acts of European administration. To such an extent has this feeling grown within recent years that administrative action sincerely taken in the best interests of the natives is frequently assailed. [Sidenote: BRITISH JUSTICE] No one would deny that blunders are but human; few would deny that the finest Colonial Office in the world—that of Great Britain—has made mistakes which subsequent history condemns. The natives have enough common-sense to make every allowance for such mistakes, but what they do not understand—and in this they are by no means alone—is, why recognition of the mistake is not made promptly, and some reparation made for the error. The plain man asks why there should be some Medo-Persian law which forbids the admission of error and the consequent refusal of reparation. This attitude is accountable for much harm to the prestige of the European in West Africa. In Government despatches, in speeches, in our schools and from our pulpits, we are never tired of preaching upon those articles of British political faith which know no party. We pride ourselves upon our love of justice and freedom, and yet we do things which we know to be utterly indefensible, which we know to be in entire contradiction to our belauded principles. We have made the blunder and we know it, but we invariably crown it with the further blunder of refusing to admit it. We know perfectly well that it is indefensible to arrest a man and arbitrarily punish him without trial, but it is done, nevertheless. During our journeys in Central Africa, we visited a grey-haired old chieftain living in a hut on the Gold Coast. The old man was reclining in a cheap deck-chair, he was totally blind and unable to stand. What was his story?