to maintain it perpetually in that position. And for this reason, that if civilisation brings with it the power to impose helotry, it also automatically generates forces which in course of time acquire a sufficient strength to destroy helotry. The helots of to-day become the rebels of to-morrow, but rebels of a very different calibre to the primitives whose opposition to the original injustice was so easily overcome. The truth is so obvious that it requires no labouring. The human mind cannot be permanently chained, least of all in Africa, where it functions in a vigorous physical tenement, is highly adaptable and imitative; where man is altogether a very vital being. And the subject has another side to it, of which colonisable or semi-colonisable Africa provides many illustrations. I select one: its moral is generally applicable. Within a few hours steaming from Marseilles, you set foot in France's oldest African colony, upon which, owing to its proximity to the homeland, a great nation has been able to bring to bear a continuous and irresistible influence for nearly a century. The results are superficially brilliant. Beneath this surface glitter achieved at enormous financial outlay, a canker gnaws. A proud race has gradually become dispossessed of its land, largely, it is fair to state, through initial mistakes committed with the best of intentions: helotry has replaced economic independence. And after nearly a century of French occupation, this is how one of the deepest students—a distinguished Frenchman—of this subject people, describes their sentiments towards their alien rulers: "Without having lived for a long time among them and having observed them constantly and critically, it would not only be difficult, it would, I think, be impossible, to form even a faint idea of the profound hatred, of the contemptuous aversion which their manners and their speech conceal. …"[1]
"The land question," states the famous report of the South African Native Affairs Committee, "dominates and pervades every other question; it is the bedrock of the native's present economic position and largely affects his social system." If that can be said as to the importance of ownership in land for African peoples in a region where a white people is growing up side by side with the
- ↑ "Recherches sur la constitution de la propriété térritoriale dans les pays musulmans, et subsidairement, en Algérie." Worms (Paris: Franck)
