Now when the European intervenes in regions where the form of native government described above prevails, the European assumes in the eyes of the native population the position of paramount authority over and above all the native authorities of the country. He becomes de facto supreme overlord. He has one of two courses to pursue. He must either govern through the existing mechanism of native government, contenting himself with exercising supervisory control without actually interfering in the ordinary functions of native government—this policy is known as indirect rule—or he must subvert native customary laws, substituting for them European conceptions of law and justice, either using the heads of the community as puppets to do his bidding (which means that they will lose all authority over the members of the community except as the servants of the white overlord) or he must arbitrarily elevate to positions of power within the community men who have no right to such positions in native custom and who, therefore, possess no local sanction behind them. That policy is known as direct rule. The Germans and, in more recent years, the French have favoured the latter policy in their tropical African possessions, the former partly from lack of experience, partly from the regimentalising tendencies of the home bureaucracy; the French, because the admirable features which distinguished many aspects of their rule in Western Africa proper, between 1880 and 1900, are being gradually obscured by, and their general administrative policy subordinated to, the purpose of militarising their African dependencies—of which more anon. In British West Africa the policy of indirect rule has been mainly followed. In British East Africa, as already stated, policy IB so entirely subordinated to the labour exigencies of Europeans that native administration in the proper sense of the term can hardly be said to exist at all.
The school of direct rulers is always influential and is favoured by certain tendencies within the Colonial Office: resisted by others. It is a curious and felicitous circumstance that although Colonial officials are nearly always drawn from classes of the home population, whose training does not make for sympathy and comprehension of native races, Britain continually throws up men who become sincerely attached to the natives and keen students of their institutions. This has been particularly
