can never themselves witness, let alone suffer from. It is virtually impossible to arouse popular interest. For these and kindred disasters are very largely brought about by the uninstructed zeal of God-fearing, Christian men and women in Europe who judge other countries by their own, other peoples by their own people, other needs by their own needs, with the best of intentions and with the purest of motives; and outside a small band of students, ethnologists and experienced officials, the public mind is scandalized and even incensed if any one ventures to doubt the excellent results necessarily flowing from disinterested action. It is disinterested: therefore it must be right. That is the popular belief and the general fallacy. Poor Mary Kingsley, who knew her West Africa as few have ever known it and who had the true scientific mind, fought hard against this ingrained characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon temperament. But she fought in vain. Despite her charity, the geniality and the humour in which she clothed her truths, she had against her the whole weight of what is called the philanthropic school of home opinion, responsible for so much good and yet for so much unconscious harm. “The stay at home statesman,” she once said, “think that Africans are all awful savages or silly children—people who can only be dealt with on a reformatory, penitentiary line. This view, you know, is not mine ... but it is the view of the statesmen and the general public and the mission public in African affairs.” And again:— “The African you have got in your mind up here, that you are legislating for and spending millions in trying to improve, doesn’t exist; your African is a fancy African.... You keep your fancy African and I wish you joy of him, but I grieve more than I can say for the real African that does exist and suffers for all the mistakes you make in dealing with him through a dream thing, the fiend-child African of your imagination. Above all, I grieve for the true negro people whose home is in the West Coast....”