CHAPTER TWENTY-FOURCircumstances alter Cases
HAD the rescue of the native tribes of Puto-Congo from the squeezing embrace of modern industrialism and its absentee shareholders been a fairy-tale, they would have remained a happy people without a history, and here at least no more would have been heard of them. But this being the real story, things went otherwise.
It is true that Native Industries Limited not only became itself a reformed character, but managed, by its control of the river routes and depots, to impose repentance on the great Puto-Congo Combine also. There, too, a rout was made of the old Board of Directors, and the missionary zeal of Free Evangelicalism, with an admixture of True Belief, held the balance of power. In the first year shares went down at a run from a thirty to a ten per cent dividend, and the mortality of indentured labour was reduced in about the same proportion.
Of course the shareholders grumbled—not at the reduced death-rate in itself, but at the awkward parallel which its proportional fall suggested between toll of life and that other toll of a more marketable kind which mainly concerned them. It was not pleasant to feel that a reduced ten per cent profit was always going to be the condition of a reduced ten per cent death-rate: that fifteen per cent of the one would cause fifteen per cent of the other, and that, by implication, a life-saving of five per cent might be effected if the chastened shareholders would stay languidly content with a five per cent profit. Mr. Trimblerigg himself felt this to be a reflection upon the reformation he had effected. He had practically promised the shareholders that decent treatment of the natives wouldeventually bring larger profits. He was annoyed that it had not done so, and was already taking steps to secure more co-ordination and efficiency in the combined companies when the war supervened and gave to the relations of the brother races, white and black, a different complexion.
To put it quite plainly, under war-conditions so far-reaching as to affect the whole world, humanitarian principles had to take second place. For the white race, or tribe, or group of tribes in which Mr. Trimblerigg found himself embraced by birth and moral training was now saving the world not only for private enterprise and democracy, but for the black and the brown and the yellow races as well, all round the globe and back again from San Francisco to Valparaiso. And so the enlistment of the black races in the cause of freedom—even with a little compulsion—became an absolute necessity, a spiritual as well as a military one, and unfortunately the blacks—and more especially the blacks of Puto-Congo—did not see it in that light of an evangelizing civilization as the whites did. They did not know what freedom really was: how could they, having no politics? Their idea of freedom was to run about naked, to live rent-free in huts of their own building on land that belonged to nobody, to put in two hours’ work a week instead of ten hours a day, and when an enemy was so craven as to let himself be captured alive to plant him head-downwards in the earth from which he ought never to have come. That was their view of freedom, and I could name sections of civilized communities holding very similar views though with a difference.
Slavery, on the other hand, was having to wear anything except beads, and nose-rings, and imitation silk-hats madeof oilskin, having to work regularly to order for a fixed wage, and to pay a hut-tax for the upkeep of a machine-like system of government, for which they had no wish and in which they saw no sense. And that being so, it really did not matter whether the power which imposed these regulations was benevolent in its intentions or merely rapacious, whether it secured them by blood, or blockade, or by bribing the tribal chiefs (which was the Free Evangelical method) to get the thing done in native ways of their own. They did not like it.
Puto-Congo, having sampled it for twenty years, had definitely decided that civilization was bad for it; and when, under the evangelizing zeal of Mr. Trimblerigg and his co-religionists, civilization modified its methods, they beat their drums for joy and believing that civilization was at last letting them go, ran off into the woods to play. And though, here and there, their chiefs hauled them back again and made them do brief spells of work at certain seasons of the year, they regarded it rather as a cleaning-up process, preparatory to leave-taking, than as a carrying on of the old system under a new form; and so they continued to play in the woods and revert to happy savagery, and especially to that complete nudity of both sexes which the missionaries so strongly disapproved.
It was that holiday feeling, coming after the bad time they had been through under the old system—a holiday feeling which even the chiefs, stimulated by bribes, could not control—which did the mischief; for it came inopportunely just at the time when, five thousand miles away, civilization had become imperilled by causes with which the Puto-Congo natives had nothing whatever to do. If civilization was so imperilled all the better for them.
It was all very unfortunate: for while the fact that civilization was at war did not make civilization more valuable to the natives of Puto-Congo, it did make the natives and their trade-produce very much more valuable to civilization. Quite half-a-dozen things which they had unwillingly produced under forced labour in the past—rubber was one—had now become military necessities. It was no longer a mere question of profits for shareholders—civilization itself was at stake. Production had suddenly to be brought back to the thirty per cent standard; and that holiday feeling, so natural but so untimely in its incidence, was badly in the way. And so powers were given (which are not usually given to commercial concerns—though sometimes taken) and under government authority—a good deal at the instigation of Mr. Trimblerigg—the Puto-Congo Combine became exalted and enlarged into the Imperial Chartered Ray River Territory Company, which was in fact a provisional government with powers of enlistment civil and military, of life and death, and the making and administration of whatever laws might be deemed necessary in an emergency.
Endowed with these high powers, the Directors at home, with every intention to use them circumspectly and in moderation, instructed their commissioners accordingly. But when the commissioners got to work they found, in the face of ‘that holiday feeling,’ that moderation did not deliver the goods. And since the goods had to be delivered, lest the world should be lost to democracy, they took advantage of the censorship which had been established against the promulgation of news unfavourable to the moral character of their own side, and took the necessary and effective means to deliver them. And when the profitsonce more began to rise, these did not go to the shareholders but to the Government as a form of war-tribute, and that, of course, made it morally all right—for the ten per cent shareholders at any rate—since they knew nothing about it.
And thus, for three or four years, Puto-Congo natives did their bit, losing their own lives at an ever-increasing death-rate, and saving democracy which they did not understand, for that other side of the world which they did not know. They got no war-medals for it and no promotion; nor were any reports of those particular casualties printed in the papers. Enough that the holiday feeling went off, and the goods were delivered. Over the rest, war-conditions and war-legislation drew a veil, and nothing was said.
And that is why, while war went on, Mr. Trimblerigg and the rest of the world did not hear of it; or if they heard anything, did not believe what they heard; for that too is one of the conditions that war imposes. Truth, then, becomes more relative than ever; which is one of the reasons why Mr. Trimblerigg was then in his element. But when the war was sufficiently over for intercommunication to re-establish itself, and when the skinning of the scapegoat had become a stale game, and when the hewing of Agag had emphatically not come off, then Mr. Trimblerigg, and others, began to hear of it. It was the others that mattered. Mr. Trimblerigg—his war-mind still upon him, and still suffering from his severe attack of Old Testament—did not believe it; but the others did, and the others were mainly the most active and humanitarian section of the Free Evangelicals. Having already expressed their disapproval of skinning the scapegoat andhewing Agag, even to the extent of pronouncing against it at their first annual conference after the war, they now fastened on the recrudescence of ugly rumours from Puto-Congo and the adjacent territories, and began to hold Mr. Trimblerigg responsible.
They had at least this much reason upon their side, that Mr. Trimblerigg was still chairman of the Directors of Native Industries Limited, and, by right of office, sat upon the administrative council of the Chartered Company. And when, as the leakage of news became larger, it seemed that everything he had formerly denounced as an organized atrocity was being, or had but recently been done on a much larger scale by his own commissioners, the cry became uncomfortably loud, and the war-mind, which can manipulate facts to suit its case while they are suppressed by law, began to find itself in difficulties.
Mr. Trimblerigg, faced by certified facts which he continued to deny or question, began jumping from the New to the Old Testament and back again with an agility which confused his traducers but did not convince them; and the allegiance of the Free Evangelicals became sharply divided. The reunion of the Free Churches for which Mr. Trimblerigg had so long been working, already adversely affected by the divergencies of the war, was now strained to breaking.
On the top of this came the news that the natives of Puto-Congo had risen in revolt and had begun massacring the missionaries, and Free Evangelical opinion became more sharply divided than ever—whether to withdraw the missions and cease to have any further connection with the Chartered Company, or to send out reinforcements,less spiritual and more military, adopt the policy of the firm hand, and restore not liberty but order.
Mr. Trimblerigg then announced that he would do both. To the Administrative Council he adumbrated a scheme for the gradual development of the Chartered Company, with its dictatorial powers, into the Puto-Congo Free State Limited, with a supervised self-government of its own, mainly native but owing allegiance to the Company on which its commercial prosperity and development would still have to depend.
Matters were at a crisis, and were rapidly getting worse. Mr. Trimblerigg had made too great a reputation over Puto-Congo affairs to risk the loss of it on a mere policy of drift. Something clearly had to be done, large, spectacular, idealistic in aim, to cover up from view a record of failure which never ought to have seen the light. Not only must it be done; it must be done at once, and he was the man to do it.
The Administrative Council was wise in its generation. Without quite believing in Mr. Trimblerigg’s proposals it gave him a free hand; for as one of them said: ‘This is a matter over which he cannot afford to fail. If he does, he is done for. Give him rope enough, he may hang others, but he won’t hang himself; of that you may be quite sure.’
Without being quite sure, they made the experiment, and Mr. Trimblerigg, with full powers, went out as High Commissioner of the Chartered Company to sow the seed, plant the roots, or lay the foundations of the Puto-Congo Free State Limited. His mission was twofold—to save the Puto-Congo natives from themselves, and the shares of the Chartered Company from further depreciation. Incidentally he had also to save himself.