And yet money had to be found immediately for railways, river transport, and irrigation. The pacification of the country and the rehabilitation of its inhabitants depended upon means of transportation and the cultivation of the land. Everything had been destroyed or had fallen into decay during the years of anarchy, so all kinds of public works needed a substantial budget. Popular education had to be thought of, and the expenses of the civil administration and a considerable military establishment provided for. Though the financial task looked so formidable as to be almost hopeless, it was successfully faced and shouldered, and the country saved from concession-hunters and insolvency by the adoption and maintenance of the conservative policy of "go slow and pay as you go." In 1910, Sir Reginald Wingate was able to report that the civil administration was paying its way; the only deficit was in the military budget. Three years later there was a surplus of two hundred thousand dollars. The Sudan had made good. A few months ago I had the privilege of spending several hours with Colonel Bernard, financial secretary of the Sudan. He explained to me the consistent policy that had been followed since Lord Kitchener had asked him to undertake the business management of the Government more than a decade ago. He spoke with the enthusiasm and keenness and understanding of an American captain of industry. Colonel Bernard is a type of officer one finds only in the British army. If he were a Frenchman, he would never have left Paris. If he were an American, he would have a yacht and a summer home at Newport or Bar Harbor, and be wondering what to do with his money. We occasionally get in our army and navy men with a genius for business, but they do not stay. It may be partly due to the fact that until the Spanish War there were no tasks to challenge this type of Sir Reginald Wingate, the sirdar, has recently been appointed high commissioner for Egypt man, but it is mostly due to the fact that our social system is wholly different from that of Great Britain. The British Colonial Empire was built and is being run by men who have gone into government service for reasons of caste. No matter how remarkable his aptitude for business, the upper-class Britisher never dreams of a business career. He is willing to leave north at a hamlet which was renamed Port Sudan. The Atbara railway shops were increased and improved, and the Sudan Government itself bore part of the expense of remaking the line from Khartum to Atbara. In 1908 telegraphic communication was completed with Gondokoro, on the White Nile, two weeks by steamer south of Khartum. The Blue Nile was bridged at Khartum for a railway into the Gezira district between the two rivers. El-Obeid, the terminus of this southern railway extension, was reached in 1913. A glance at the map is necessary to realize what tremendous territory the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan covers, and how impossible it is for the administrators of the country to pacify the country, much less to develop its resources completely and to civilize it, until more railways are built, reaching into the heart of all the different provinces. The greatest appeal to the imagination of the British public in connection with the reconquest of the Sudan was the fulfilment of the task for which it was generally believed that Gordon had given his life, the suppression of the slave-trade. Although the difficulties seemed insurmountable in so far as slavery within the tribes was concerned, Lord Cromer felt it incumbent on him to mention in his report almost every year the progress of the slave-suppression crusade. In 1903 he confessed his disappointment that slavetrade was not extinct; in 1904 he announced a marked decrease in slave-trade; in 1905 he said that it was difficult to check slave-traffic in the Kordofan province; in 1906 he believed that there would still be great difficulty in suppressing the slave-trade; and in 1907 he attributed most of the trouble in Kordofan to the anti-slavery policy to which the Government was committed. The road to abolition, he remarked in his last report, "is a very long road, and it will take years to 1 Lord Kitchener did not return in five years, as he hoped. But he visited Khartum again in 1910, and was promising himself a long tour, after he went back to Cairo as his Majesty's agent and consul-general, when the present war broke out. Sir Reginald Wingate, writing to me from Khartum in June, said: I think it fell to few to get to know him as get to the end of it." Improved communications, however, and the advance of colonial enterprise in British, German, Belgian, and French equatorial colonies, helped to put a stop to long-distance slaverunning. The area of operations of slave merchants has been gradually circumscribed until in 1914 the official report announced that slave-traffic was "almost impossible" in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. British officials who have to deal with slavery at close range, especially the judges, consider this statement a bit too optimistic. Slave-traffic can be detected and frequently punished when it is carried on from district to district; but within tribal limits, especially if the tribes be Moslem, legal evidence is hard to obtain even where moral certainty of definite cases of slavery exists. Where slavery is as established an institution as polygamy, decrees bind only those who dare or who want to take advantage of them. There are cases without number, also, where the slaves are ignorant of the abolition of the decree, and even if it were explained to them, they would not know what it meant. Education is a necessary prerequisite to the functioning and enjoying of Occidental social and political institutions. Enthusiasts and sentimentalists forget the fact that our ancestors did not evolve, support, and use these institutions until we conceived and desired them as a result of education. Lord Kitchener's first visit to the Sudan after the Boer War was to open Gordon College, in 1902, when he was on his way to India. In his address he asserted his entire sympathy with the objects of the college on the lines originally conceived, although he admitted the necessity of using public funds for the advancement of primary teaching. He expressed the hope that he would be able to return in five years and find that higher education was being given at Gordon College.1 intimately as I did. Under his cold exterior beat a very warm and kind heart, but he was most successful in keeping this from the world. To this country he is a great loss, for I know his heart was in it, and he was almost worshiped by the people, from whom I have had hundreds of telegrams and letters of condolence and sympathy.' Although Gordon College is not as yet in a position to offer courses such as are given in Robert College at Constantinople, the Syrian Protestant College at Beirut, and several Indian and Chinese universities, it is far ahead of any institution of learning in Africa or Asia in the extension of research laboratories and in the coöperation it gives to the Government for the development of the resources of the country, the betterment of public health, and ethnological investigation. Gordon College is a state institution, which works with and for the Government. I wish it were possible to speak here of the wonderful things that are being done by Dr. Chalmers and others in the Wellcome Research Laboratories. It is a revelation of the ability and the devotion of the scientists to whom the manifold problems of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan have been a challenge sufficiently engrossing to keep them far from the great world and yet develop their genius so strikingly that the great world's attention is continually called to what they are doing and discovering. But it is more than that. A visit to Gordon College and the Wellcome Laboratories opens one's eyes to the methods that are being pursued by Sir Reginald Wingate and his associates, and the goal they have before them. There is no highly civilized country in the world where more constant attention is paid to means of developing resources and better ability is invested in the study than in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In addition to the research work of Gordon College, the department of education has established a central research farm at Khartum North. Here field experiments in growing what the Sudan might produce are tried out, and practical work is done in horticulture and forestry. At Gordon College and in three cities industrial workshops teach boys trades. The criticism has frequently been made. against the British administration in the Sudan, as in Egypt, that educational facilities are not so fully extended as they ought to be, and that the British have neglected the moral factor and emphasized the material in building up the country. This raises one of the most thorny problems that confront those who are engaged in bringing Africa and Asia under European control. On the one hand, in Egypt and the Sudan, it can be argued that there must be money before ambitious schemes of universal popular education are undertaken. Before the money can be found, the country must be developed economically. It is not that public works and material benefits are more essential than education, but that education for all is so tremendously costly that only a country the resources of which are fully developed can maintain schools for its population. It is pointed out, moreover, that even if there were. money, teachers would be lacking, and that it takes a whole generation to train enough teachers to meet even a portion of the needs of the next generation. On the other hand, especially in view of what we have said about the necessity of education before Occidental social and political institutions can be wanted, understood, and taken advantage of by natives, is it not true that primary education is necessary to a country's development, and that if the people are to benefit by material prosperity, they must have a moral preparation? Although I have taught for several years in educational institutions in the near East, and have seen this problem at close range in half a dozen countries, I do not profess to offer a solution. But we must make a wide and determined start in primary education, and that demands teachers. To get the teachers higher institutions are necessary. When we put boys through the colleges, few of them want to teach or do teach. They become dissatisfied, as they have every reason to be, with existing conditions; but their patriotism does not inspire in them the will to make the sacrifice and to take the cross individually in order that their people may be brought to enlightenment. Far from following the only possible way they have of serving their country wisely, they agitate for European institutions, for social and political recognition, judging the up Irrigating Egypt: the great dam at Assuan, a mile and a quarter long feeling and need of the race solely by their own exotic condition. The curse of Western education upon Orientals is that we try to build where there is no foundation of character. Instead, then, of having wood that takes a polish, we get a veneer that cracks at the first test. Missionaries and educators have success only with boys whom they take away from their families and bring under their home influence very early in life. But they turn out young men who are foreigners to their own people, and who have no desire or ability to go back among their own people and impart what has been given to them. Good farmers and goatherds and blacksmiths and cobblers are spoiled to make imitation "gentlemen." The educated Oriental will not work even if he is starving.1 1 Several years ago I was preaching in a small inland city of Pennsylvania. The local department-store proprietor told me that a Christian Arab boy from "a college somewhere out in Turkey" was in town, and that he had somehow been unable to give the boy work. He was puzzled, for the boy seemed to be strong and husky. He Educating boys in trades, as the Sudan education department has started to do, is an excellent thing. But it ought to be done much more widely than is being done. And money ought to be spent more freely than is being spent in primary education. The Sudan boasts of fifteen hundred miles of railway in fifteen years, two thousand miles of regular river steamship service, and five thousand miles of telegraph wires. But fewer than five thousand Sudanese in schools of all grades, primary to college, is not a very good showing, despite the difficulties. After the Cairo Convention was arranged between Egypt and Great Britain in January, 1899, the British Foreign Office was in a position to treat with other nations and other British colonies con |