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.