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 Photograph by Brown Brothers 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." rules. Art, music, letters, the stage, and even the movies are hers. She censors our films. Her opera-twenty-six weeks of it, with Christendom's best virtuosi forms our musical taste. Her actors lead, sometimes securing their "one hundred nights on Broadway" by letting in "deadheads," sometimes by sheer merit. With her Metropolitan Museum, her public monuments, and her world-renowned picture-mart, she trains our eye for beauty. With only three exceptions, all the nationally influential magazines are hers. She plays hostess to our Associated Press. Her newspapers dominate the country. By rewriting, by reprinting, or by direct syndication, provincial journalism echoes and reëchoes New York. Many a provincial reads the stepmother in the original text. NEW YORK's literary efforts display a remarkable versatility, I confess. Quoth a fair New-Yorker, "I do enjoy writing for 'Pugslie's'-they want nothing wholesome." Yet New York goes in furiously for wholesomeness, as a rule, and the children wonder at times if she is in a position to pound the pulpit-cushions so canonically. I recall the definition, "Character: what you are in the dark," and its paraphrase, "Character: what you are in New York." Yet what impresses me in New York is not her frivolity. It is her decency, her courage, her kindness. Of all great cities New York is by far the most moral outwardly, and who will fail to recognize the social value of even outward morality? Of all great cities she is by far the pluckiest. She breeds fighters like Riis and Rainsford, Abbott and Potter, Jerome, Roosevelt, and Hughes. She has tamed her police. She has taken a long, long stride toward abolishing the feudal system that centers in Tammany Hall. Big business behaves, or pretends to. Gamblers have ceased collecting art-treas dangerous. The tenement has improved. So has "Coney." Every advance costs a battle, and the end is not yet. New York realizes it. What with explosions, plagues, holocausts, "race wars," "crime waves," and strikes, there are warnings in abundance of more fights coming. Tammany's striped beast is not dead. It sleeps. The underworld is not banished; every few days a sociologist unearths new miseries. And, mind you, this same New York surmounted her Municipal Building with a statue of Civic Pride. She does not like the recrudescence of evil. But, such is her pluck, she takes it as a challenge, and retorts: "After a hundred fights, the hundred and first? Then lead me to it!" And the pluck of individual NewYorkers! Some fail, and keep smiling. Aged business men, broken down and now doing office-boys' work, show a cheerfulness never to be observed elsewhere. In summer the whole metropolis is parboiled. On a torrid morning in July question the wretches who have slept out on benches. They chuckle. Or ask Avenue A's opinion of Avenue A. "Fine," you hear, "though it's cooler on Blackwell's Island, and we pay too much rent. But move away? Leave little old New York? Never!" Parisians love Paris, though not in any such way as that. Half the Londoners hate London. In the British metropolis, as in the French, life is stationary. The submerged remain submerged. People at the surface are not climbing higher. Whereas in New York the superb phenomenon is this: millions helping more millions up, and themselves, too, and the whole community. To those above it brings a thrill of joyous satisfaction. To those below it brings faith in the active, aggressive kindness of their city. Faith, I say, for only faith discerns a city's soul. And faith depends on mood. In a dismal mood one may see the squalor of New York, her misery, her shame. They are real. But it is something of an art to be dismal there. The more than crystalline brilliancy of the atmosphere, |