No doubt had Mr. Trimblerigg been able to announce to the natives, that the white race with its civilizing mission, its religious principles, its rubber interests, and its shares, was prepared to clear out of the country, lock, stock, and barrel, and restore them the crude independence they had never willingly let go,--no doubt had he begun withdrawing his missions to the coast, and made the interior prohibited territory to his rubber-collectors, he would have found fewer of his missionaries entered head-downwards into future life as he advanced his armed guards, his rescue-work, and his reforms. But so long as the white missions and the traders remained active the natives could not be convinced. Nor was Mr. Trimblerigg entirely a free agent, he still had the shareholders behind him--albeit shareholders professing Christianity; and these were people who believed in the civilizing mission not only of race but of organized capital. And because native ways of shedding blood were a savagery which must be put down, while civilized ways of restoring order were a ‘military necessity’ and a ‘moral obligation’ combined; and because if they did not get the rubber somebody else would, and their civilizing trade would suffer,--therefore they hung on, and would not let go. And though Mr. Trimblerigg had full power given him, it was power that must be used to a certain end; and the end, put briefly, was that Christianity and Capital must continue their civilizing mission in company, and win back Puto-Congo to the ways of the world. Having stated the moral obligation I draw as much of a veil over it as I can, making history brief; for Mr. Trimblerigg, much against his will, was obliged to fulfil it in terms of Relative Truth, such as the natives could understand. In a crisis the Mosaic law is so much easier and quicker to explain to primitive races than the other law which came later. For these races stand at a stage of the world’s history; and what the higher races went through, by way of judicial experiment, they must go through also. Even by Christians, when it comes to the point, Christianity has never been regarded as a short cut--not even among themselves. For them and for all the rest of the civilized world, Moses is still the law-giver, and there is no transfiguration yet for the thunders of Mount Sinai; its lightnings continue to strike under the New Dispensation as of old. So it had to be now. The natives of Puto-Congo themselves indicated what form of instruction best suited them; and under Mr. Trimblerigg’s dispensation it was no longer only the missionaries who were buried head-downwards and painted black-and-tan, to match the landscape with its foregrounds of burnt-out villages and long tracks of charred jungle wherein nothing lived or moved.