quite innocent of complicity with the recruiters; but, bad as it was, it was made infinitely worse by the exaggeration of the newspaper referred to, which found no difficulty in coming to the conclusion that 'Slavery has been flourishing in the Territory of Papua for years.'' He considers that the employer was "certainly rather badly treated," or "there was nothing in the very voluminous evidence which even suggested that he had done anything wrong." As we wrote at the time, it is satisfactory to know that public opinion in Australia is sensitive to changes of forced labour or slavery, and also that the Commonwealth Government took vigorous measures to right the wrong done. The war has had little direct effect upon the natives, but they did good service in connection with the defence of the wireless station at Port Moresby, and, as we learn from the reports of the Governor and one of the Resident Magistrates, they are all strongly anti-German and hold "anything short of death" to be preferable to being handed over to the German Government. Review. TRADE POLITICS AND CHRISTIANITY IN AFRICA AND THE EAST. BY A. J. MACDONALD.1 THIS book was written as an Essay for the Maitland Prize at Cambridge in 1915 on the subject "Problems raised by the contact of the West with Africa and the East, and the part that Christianity can play in their solution," which was awarded to Mr. Macdonald. It is of a somewhat discursive character, dealing with a variety of questions-labour, commerce, education, liquor, opium, etc.,-affecting native races, on which Mr. Macdonald holds sound views, although the book would be more effective had it been shorter and the writer content to take a more restricted survey and cover rather less ground. His data are derived from Reports, official and otherwise, and from books and magazine articles by well-known authorities, especially Sir Harry Johnston, who contributes an introduction in which he states his object and that of the author as being "to uphold the work of Christian missionaries in general, and to lay down the rule that our relations with the backward. peoples of the world should be carried on consonantly with the principles of Christian ethics . . . with a view to . . . enable them some day to be entirely self-dependent, and yet interdependent with us on universal human co-operation in world-management." The subject to which most space is devoted is that of the evils of the liquor traffic among the natives of Africa, India and Ceylon. In Africa Mr. Macdonald strongly advocates prohibition; in India he deprecates the Government refusal to grant local option and is of opinion that the Mission1 Longmans, Green & Co. 1 aries do not take full advantage of the opening for restrictions on drinking afforded by a widespread desire for temperance reform on the part of natives of differing religious faiths. Such desire should form “a vital point of contact for Christian missions with native ethical opinion.” Mr. Macdonald enunciates an important principle when he emphasizes the weight of expert opinion in favour of the spread of Christianity as a sound imperial principle of action, and of missionary enterprise as a means of carrying it out. The missionary organizations have, he says, too long regarded themselves as outside of imperial policy and activity. "Not until they and the Church at home realize that the work of administrator and missionary have the same object in view will true imperial action and a true civilization in the tropical and sub-tropical regions be possible. . . We need a Christian Imperialism and a Christian commercialism. We also need an imperial Christianity and an economic religion." "The story of foreign missions is as much a part of the story of the Empire as any record of administrative action or commercial expansion." This is well said. Mr. Macdonald recognizes the urgent problems connected with native labour and holds that forced labour, even in the modified form of contract labour, which savours to the African of slavery, "is not in accordance with British traditions and sentiment, or with native wishes." The procedure in South Africa must be revised, and recruiting more carefully controlled. The writer praises the Portuguese labour regulations in West Africa, but seems scarcely aware that these have to a large extent remained regulations on paper, We are glad to notice the stress which he lays on the need that the Christian church should follow up the education of public opinion on subjects. affecting native races. "It is true," he writes, "that the trading instinct and spirit is the most difficult of all the manifestations of mammon which the Church has to face, but it is not clear that she has always condemned where condemnation was needed, or taught where enlightenment might have helped, or learned where her own knowledge was sadly deficient. Rubber-atrocities, scandals on the cocoa-plantations, the abuse of the liquor traffic, are all manifestations of the same evil. Western commerce has yet to adopt the Christian ideal.” Mr. Macdonald sees that new problems have been created by the trade with natives in alcohol, opium and gunpowder, and by insidious forms of slave labour, as well as by the difficult question of sex and intermarriage between the white and coloured races, which he discusses at some length. The solution lies in his opinion in Christianity, not as a metaphysic dogma, but "in the quiet teaching of Christian ethic and the inculcation of Christian practice." |