And they also were hardly to blame; for wherever the missionaries went before, order--or attempted order--had come after. Submission had been preached till the natives would no longer submit; civilization had been painted in all the colours of the rainbow, till civilization had come and bruised them black and blue, and tanned their hides for them; or did so when it caught them. For to begin with the natives had only rebelled by ceasing to hew wood and draw water, or collect the rubber and other commodities which the Chartered Company was out to collect; and running away into the woods had hidden themselves; only defensively setting traps and laying ambushes, when the emissaries of the Chartered Company came to fetch them back again. And because, in many cases, the missionaries were sent as fore-runners, they started to make examples of the missionaries; and when the missionaries came and opened deceiving mouths at them, they devised a sure method for keeping their mouths shut by burying them head-downwards in the ground. And when the missionaries showed them those rainbows of promise, in which they no longer believed, they painted the missionaries in the truer colours of black and tan. And so it had come about that, when Mr. Trimblerigg got to the country, the mortality among the missionaries and their lay-followers was very nearly as high and very nearly as painful as the mortality had been among the natives of the Puto-Congo and Ray River Territory, till they had taken to the woods to save themselves. I have little doubt that had Mr. Trimblerigg’s diverted attention-- diverted to the saving of democracy, the skinning of the scapegoat and the hewing of Agag,--had it been recalled a little earlier in the direction where it would have done more good, and had he promulgated his idea of a Free State Limited five years sooner, when the call first came for Puto-Congo to assist in the saving of civilization, I have very little doubt that he could have done what he now failed to do, by methods which would have left his reputation very much as they found it. But when he arrived upon the scene the natives had got to a state of mind in which they could see nothing with any appetite except blood, and hear nothing except the cries of their victims; and in spite of Mr. Trimblerigg’s proclamations of peace and goodwill (under certain governing conditions) the burying habit, with its painted accompaniments, went on: got worse, in fact, instead of better.