It is easy to be uncharitable and even unjust when writing on this subject. The contrast between the _selfish_ motives of the trader and the unselfish motives of the missionary has been overworked. It is not necessarily greed for gold that takes the trader to Africa, but often a perfectly honourable ambition. Besides, I have known traders who went to Africa chiefly because it offered the most immediate opportunity in sight for them to help out at home when younger brothers and sisters were to be educated and the family was in straitened circumstances. The pity is that they did not know the subtlety of the temptations awaiting them. They were strong enough to live up to their moral standards, but they did not see that those standards themselves would imperceptibly be lowered. Yet this is what happens. In a recent book, _The Basis of Ascendancy_, the author, Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, speaking of the small proportion (as it seems to him) of the nation’s brains which the Southern white man of the United States supplies as compared with the New Englander, sets forth most earnestly the danger to the white man in the Southern states of contact with the low standards of an inferior race. The significant fact, Mr. Murphy says, is not the mere pressure of a lower racial standard, but the white man’s cumulative modification of his own standards of self-criticism and self-direction: “Through the conditions of his familiar contact with less highly developed habits of efficiency, with forms of will more immature than his, he is deprived of that bracing and corrective force, resident in the standard of his peers, which, manifesting itself within every personal world as one of the higher forms of social coöperation, is, in fact, the moral equivalent of competition. He may sin and not die. His more exacting expectations of himself are not echoed from without. Of himself, as he would prefer to see himself, there is no spiritual mirror. The occasional tendency to take himself at his second best is socially unchecked, and both his powers and his inclinations tend to assume the forms of approximation imposed by a life of habitual relationship with a mind lower than his own. “To say that the stronger tends to become brutal because the weaker is brutal, or slovenly because the weaker is slovenly, is to touch the process only on its surface. The deeper fact is not that of imitation, nor yet that of contagion. It is that tragedy of recurrent accommodations, of habitual self-adjustment to lower conceptions of life and to feebler notions of excellence, which is nothing less than education in its descending and contractive forms.” This is incomparably more true in Africa than it ever has been or ever can be in the Southern states. The worst of the remote possibilities which Mr. Murphy describes are fully realized in Africa. The velocity of the process is accelerated by the depressing effect of the climate.