Ever, it is the same impelling
desire.
'Well, the way to adopt with natives, was to show them how to obtain more
food. Benefit them in that manner, and they would regard you as their
friend, and you would have influence over them. I always paid a native,
doing unskilled work, the wage a white would have received for the same
effort. It was mere justice. Yet, so small a thing had immense results,
for manhood was cultivated in the black. Self-respect infected him. He
discovered himself, with proud surprise, to be a man instead of a
chattel.
'The mystery of managing native races, resolves itself into a few natural
laws. My hardest trouble was the witchcraft, which held in bonds, the
savage peoples whom I had to govern. It might differ, here or there, in
its characteristics; the evil was there all the same. Not merely did the
natives believe in witch-craft, having been swathed in it for ages, but
their chiefs made a profit therefrom, and were staunch for its
maintenance. My antidote was the introduction of medical aid, so that in
the cures wrought, those children of the dark, might see what surpassed
their own magic. They were discomfited, as it were, on their own ground.
'Superstition, which I distinguish from witchcraft, though the greater
evil flourished on the less, had its best treatment in the spread of the
Christian religion.
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