WHITE MAN'S WORK IN ASIA AND AFRICA.
The White Man's Work in Asia and Africa : a Discussion of the Main Difficulties of the Colour Question. By Leonard Alston, M.A. (Longmans and Co. 3s. net.)—This little volume—" substantially that which won the Maitland Prize at Cambridge in 1906"— is a work the academic excellence of which cannot be called in question. In style and in command of English the author dis- plays a singular ability ; but the book is more noteworthy for these characteristics than for any practical suggestion which it contains for the solution of the most important question of the future. It is not that Mr. Alston is an armchair critic; the greater part of his life, ho tells us, has been lived in the British dominions overseas ; nor does his clear and scholarly statement of the factors, political, social, and religious, which combine to make the colour problem so complicated give good ground for any doubt as to his grasp of the situation. But his writing is pervaded with a somewhat vague optimism, which, when he deals with such topics as the limit that should be set to inter- ference with national customs, amounts almost to a bogging of the question. "There is no simple rule by which we may decide," he says. "Intervention is here helpful and there harmful. We must go forward, holding as patiently as may be to a policy of main- taining intact all such native institutions as seem to make in favour of the higher interests of the people, hesitating always to destroy what is not irretrievably harmful, and desirous always of stimulating growth from within, rather than of superseding inferiorities by ready-made superiorities from without." With the theory of this we are all in agreement, Briton and Burman alike; but does it advance us one step towards a true solution ? There is, as Mr. Alston admits, no rule by which we may decide, and the enunciation by way of guidance of any ethical principle, . however admirable, cannot but be of the nature of a eireutus in definicndo.
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