The truth is that the white man in the tropics is out of his element as much as the diver who works in the deep sea. The atmosphere in which he was produced and in which he developed—the mental, moral, social and physical conditions—are also necessary to his moral and physical maintenance. The climate weakens and depresses him, while at the same time he is not sustained by domestic cheer and the society of equals to which he has been accustomed. He is invariably nervous and as a consequence impatient, while at the same time the circumstances that confront him in the discharge of his daily duties are such as would try the temper of a saint. If he remain long in a climate so unnatural to him and in a strange and uncivilized society the likelihood is that there will be an imperceptible and unconscious lowering of moral standards and accommodation to the standards of the society around him. Cruelty which at first shocked him gradually ceases to shock and at length he becomes indifferent, or perhaps himself capable of barbarous deeds from which he would at first have recoiled with horror. For the men of whom I have been speaking are not inferior to the average man at home. Your virtues, and the graces of mind and character upon which you pride yourself—your strength and composure, your patience and devotion to duty, your honesty, your justice, your purity—all these belong not only to yourself but to the society which has produced you and of which you are a part. The moral standards which it has erected in the course of its social evolution, the safety with which it has surrounded you, the comforts which this safety has made procurable, the disapprobation by which it punishes any infraction of its laws—to these, not to yourself alone, you owe your moral attainments. None but the highest and most fixed moral standards will bear transportation to a tropical climate and tropical society. Until this fact is clearly recognized the relation of civilization to the uncivilized tropics is likely to be productive of misery and shame. If I did not hate sensationalism I could easily fill this chapter with a record of the misdeeds and barbarities in Africa of men, many of whom belonged to respectable families and to good society and were well-behaved at home. Neither does the white man become acclimated in the tropics—no more than the diver in the deep sea. The longer he remains, his physical and moral resources become the more exhausted. Let us keep these facts in mind in judging those of whom we have spoken, and those of whom we have yet to speak in the next chapter. X WHITE AND BLACK “Our only program, I am anxious to repeat, is the work of moral and material regeneration.”—_King Leopold II._ “The work of civilization, as you call it, is an enormous and continual butchery.”—_M. Lorand, in the Belgian Parliament._