natives carried him to his grave chanting The white man has killed the cook.' Rören sums up by saying: 'This is one of the cases where I cannot exonerate the Colonial Director [Dernburg] from the reproach of hushing-up, for this case was made known to him.'

A resident in East Africa speaks of floggings being 'ordered daily by the administrative officials,' and also by employers. Only managers of estates were supposed to have the right to cause labourers to be flogged, but this rule was broken continually. If a native complained to the Native Commissioner, who might live many miles away, and the employer and the Commissioner were friends, the native was generally flogged again. Native Akidas (Government officials), and even Askaris (police soldiers), were known to order floggings. Cases might be multiplied ad infinitum. A missionary, long resident in East Africa, referred to the 'cowed state of the natives, who flew to obey a German officer, if the latter only lifted his finger.' Christian natives greatly resented this treatment. When accusations were brought, in 1915, against two of our own missionaries, who were tried at Tabora charged with teaching the natives heliography and inciting the Wagogo to rise against the Germans, the witnesses on their behalf were intimidated by receiving floggings varying from a hundred to a hundred and ten lashes. Four remained steadfast. One only, being threatened with death, bore false witness momentarily, but at the trial confessed that he had lied, and the missionaries were saved.

Dernburg had no real sympathy for the natives, although he told the Budget Committee of the Reichstag that it made 'a very unfavourable impression to see so many white men going about with negro whips. There was even one on the table of the principal pay office of Dar-es-Salaam.' Nevertheless Deputy Ledebour said in the Reichstag on March 17, 1908, that a member of the Commission would produce a letter from a pastor at Dar-es-Salaam, stating that the natives, who accompanied Dernburg from Muansa to Tabara, said they would never travel with him again, 'never having been so much beaten in their lives.'

It must not be thought that flogging was limited to men. Christian native girls of marriageable age were

flogged at mission stations to prevent their marrying non-Christians. According to German East African papers, this happened at a mission station, though the Imperial Chancellor, in his answer to Dr Müller, Deputy for Meiningen, in 1914, denied official knowledge of it.

Writing on Sept. 25, 1905, in the Cape Argus,' a 'Young Dutchman' tells a gruesome story of crimes of which he was an eyewitness. On Feb. 12 he had seen eight women and six children strung up by their necks to trees, and shot. He adds:

'All the women and children we captured, while I was on the march, were treated in the same way. I have seen with my own eyes at least twenty-five of them hanged and shot. Women, not executed, were put to carry very heavy loads in connexion with the harbour works. If, as constantly happened, they fell down from exhaustion, they were sjamboked. They were nothing but skin and bone, picking up bread and refuse, and were flogged when caught doing so."

Mr Percival Griffiths saw children as young as four and five made to work and ill-treated like their unfortunate elders,' and women and children dropping down when carrying heavy bags weighing from 100 to 160* lbs. He says, 'They are sjamboked when they fall until they get up again. Across the face was the favourite place for sjamboking.' Mr Griffiths had seen the blood flowing from the faces of women and little children. He had never himself seen one die on the spot, though he had seen them apparently in extremis, but he said they died daily in considerable numbers.

After that, even the outrages practised on men to compel them to work seem as nothing by comparison. Not alone, however, on humanitarian grounds, but because it warred so fatally against colonial development, the so-called forced labour, which was near akin to slavery, merits exposure. The natives were carried off, against their wills, from their homes. Their crops

suffered, and their land often remained entirely uncultivated; yet, as pointed out earlier, climatic conditions made the extension of native culture a matter of permanent importance. It was one thing to labour with the prospect of reaping the fruits, as free men, on their own soil; it was quite another to be forcibly seized and

bound, and made to toil under the lash of a cruel overseer through long weary hours, and then herded together at night under conditions so insanitary as to bring every foul and loathsome disease in their train. Prussian unwisdom set systematically to work to ruin their physique and take the heart out of the men on whose well-being and contentment the desired economic success depended. Villages came to be denuded of younger men. Fear of being captured drove them into the bush, where many died from hunger and sickness, and others became the prey of wild beasts. Only very old men, women and children remained in the villages. In some cases the women never saw their husbands for years; the birth-rate sank proportionately; and land, once productive, was left untilled. Nothing else was to be expected where recruiters forced their way into villages, and battered in the roofs, or set the houses on fire, if the men hid themselves in their homes. Police sergeants and their men posted themselves by the wayside at points where natives, carrying their produce to the towns, passed to and fro, and, forcing them to throw down their wares, carried them off, roped to each other, to work on plantations, roads, or railways. Lesser chiefs were employed in this vile service, stimulated by capitation fees to commit gross abuses; others, again, were simply compelled under threats of dire penalties to supply the required number of men from their tribes. In the words of Deputy Dittmann in 1914:

The effect of the exploiting reign of capitalism is simply awful upon the natives; and what has become known during the last weeks puts a definite end to the naïve representations that since the Dernburg era a good time had dawned for the natives through the reforms that had been introduced. . . . An awful decimation of the native population runs parallel with the coming to the fore of the so-called capitalistic Kultur.'

The wages on the plantations were of the smallest, and even so were often reduced, owing to the practice of reckoning ten hours of labour as only a quarter-day, by way of punishment for supposed delinquencies. The recognition of these abuses, to which the Social Democrats drew attention in the first instance, was taken up more and more by middle-class politicians and the press,

till in 1914 Herr Dittmann could say truly that, 'a simply overwhelming wealth of proof of the correctness of the assertions of his party had come from that side.'

was none.

This forced labour existed in all the African colonies, though the Secretary of State, Dr Solf, told the members of the Reichstag in Committee that theoretically there In East Africa it was veiled under a system of labour tickets, which meant that every black man had to work twenty days a month for the white men, or be taken to the police-station and sjamboked. Deputy Erzberger's comment on this, on March 7, 1914, was that the official report of the Protectorates for 1913-14 bore almost on every page 'a piercing, heart-rending cry concerning the treatment by white men of the black workmen on the plantations.' He added that, if a certain number of plantations in East Africa and the Cameroons could 'only be made to pay by manuring them with the blood of the natives, that would only bring a curse on the colonies and the Fatherland.'

In the Cameroons, especially, conditions were becoming intolerable, and were fearlessly exposed by the Bremen merchant Herr Vietor to the Reichstag Commission. It is not possible here to quote from Vietor's many reports and statements, but it is sufficient to state that they are amply supported by correspondence in our possession and by the statements of many independent witnesses. The testimony we have gathered shows that on many plantations the death-rate was abnormally high, that certain districts were becoming depopulated, that flogging was rampant, and that the labourers were driven in gangs to the plantations like so many cattle, or forcibly impressed into prolonged tasks of road-making and railway-building.

The hut tax was instituted to force the natives to work to earn it, but the earnings were totally inadequate. Here, too, the abuses were not limited to men. We learn of 'pregnant women and school-children' being compelled to help in the arduous task of road-making. Space forbids dealing at length with the subject; it can only be said that a veritable Niagara of evidence has poured in upon us as to the moral, physical and economic débâcle caused by a system so revolting that it takes us back in thought to the darkest pages in the world's

history. Not the least ugly feature connected with it is that, where the whip was not included, the brandy bottle was brought into play. Taught to drink 'schnaps,' the natives pledged their farms and sold their freedom for it. That fearless missionary Herr J. Scholze, lecturing at Carlsruhe in October 1904, said:

'The missionaries speak very straightly to the natives, but their critics think one can only lead the negro to work with the whip and alcohol. They use both means of education freely, especially the brandy, which causes the complete degradation of the natives. . . . the more schnaps, the more slaves' ('Die Wahrheit über die Heidenmission' U.S.W.).

Neither officers nor civil officials were above using brandy to enlist labourers. Some natives and tribes recognised the danger that threatened to overwhelm them, but unfortunately in most cases they put up a feeble resistance. It was the curse of drink which caused Samuel Maherero, the supreme chief of the Hereros, to let himself become a tool for so many years in German hands, and caused him to part recklessly with farm after farm of tribal land. But it was not till the year 1883 that the Hereros took to heavy drinking. So late as 1874, they had smashed a trader's brandy kegs to save themselves from what they termed 'poisonous devil water.' A few years later they had learnt their lesson from the white man only too well, so that von François wrote of them: arms, munitions, and brandy form the chief articles of commerce.'

German writers would have us believe that the Herero rising in 1904 was due to the mistrust aroused by the official stamping of guns, which made the natives fear that their weapons were about to be taken away from them. The same writers put down the awful impoverishment of the tribes to the ravages amongst their cattle caused by the Rinderpest. That is not so. The causes of the Herero rising were the desire to throw off the intolerable yoke of Germany, the spoliation of their lands for concession companies and plantations, the heavy and unjust sentences passed upon them for trivial offences, the inequality between black men and white men before the law, and above all the seizure of their cattle, on which they looked almost with veneration,