’Not on the one I speak of.  In Matanga a small force of them, yes!  But even they were difficult to manage, and you could not depend upon them.  They would desert at the first opportunity, sell their guns, your peace-offerings of brass rods, and whatever they could lay their hands on, and straggle behind in the dusk until they got lost.  It was no use sending back for them in the morning.  One would only have found their bones, and their bones pretty well scoured too.  I speak of them as a class, of course.  There were races loyal enough no doubt, the Zanzibari, for instance.  But the difficulty with them was to prevent them fighting when there was no occasion.  In fact the blacks who were loyal made up for their loyalty by a lack of common-sense.’

‘Cause and effect, I should be inclined to call the combination,’ remarked Fielding, ‘with the lack of common-sense as the cause.’

Mrs. Willoughby looked her gratitude across the table, and again her lips moved.  Drake chanced to catch her eye, and in spite of herself she rippled to a laugh.  She had been defending herself by a repetition of the editor’s comment of “filibuster.”

But at the same moment that Drake’s glance met hers she had just waked up to the humour of her conduct, and recognised it as a veritable child’s device.  She could not but laugh, and, laughing there into the eyes of the man, she lost her hostility to him.  However, Mrs. Willoughby made an effort to recover it.

‘Well, I don’t see,’ she said to Drake, ’what right you have got to marching into other people’s countries even though they are black.’

‘Ah!’ Drake answered.  ’That’s precisely what I call, if I may say so, the fireside point of view.  We obey a law of nature rather than claim a right.  One can discuss the merits of a law of nature comfortably by a fireside.  But out there one realises how academic the discussion is, one obeys it.  The white man has always spread himself over the country of the black man, and we may take it he always will.  He has the pioneer’s hankering after the uttermost corners of the earth, and in addition to that the desire to prosper.  He obeys both motives; they are of the essence of him.  Besides, if it comes to a question of abstract right, I am not sure we couldn’t set up a pretty good case.  After all, a nation holds its country primarily to benefit itself, no doubt, but also in trust for the world; and the two things hang together.  It benefits itself by observing that trust.  Now the black man seals his country up, he doesn’t develop it.  In the first place he doesn’t know how to, and in the second, if he did, he would forget as soon as he could.  I suppose that it is impossible to estimate the extent of the good which the opening of Africa has done for an overcrowded continent like Europe; and what touches Europe touches the world, no doubt of that, is there?  But I’m preaching,’ and he came abruptly to an end.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Mr. Le Mesurier, and he voiced a question the others felt an impulse to ask, ’is, how on earth you are content to settle down as a business man in the City?’