such ballasting as one sees on the North-Western Railway. Nothing cheap
or flimsy about the culverts. Railway stations built regardless of cost
and the possibility of traffic; stone houses and waiting-rooms roofed
with soft red tiles that are in such contrast to the red-washed
corrugated iron roofing one sees in British East Africa. Expensive
weighbridges where it seemed there was nothing but a few natives with an
occasional load of mangoes and bananas. Here was an indifference to mere
dividends; at every point evidence abounded of a lavish display of
public money through a generous Colonial Office. For in the
Wilhelmstrasse this colony was ever the apple of their eye, and money
was always ready for East African enterprises.

Yet the planters complain, just as planters do all over the world, of
the indifference of Governments and the parsimony of executive
officials. A Greek rubber planter told me, from the standpoint of an
intelligent and benevolent neutrality (and who so likely to know the
meaning of benevolence in neutral obligations as a Greek?), that the
Government charged huge freights on this line, killed young enterprise
by excessive charges, gave no rebates even to German planters, and in
other ways seemed indifferent to the fortunes of the sisal and rubber
planters. True they built the railway; but what use to a planter to
build a line and rob him of his profits in the freight? This gentleman
of ancient Sparta frankly liked the Germans and found them just; and he
was in complete agreement with the native policy that made every black
brother do his job of work, the whole year round, at a rate of pay that
fully satisfied this Greek employer's views on the minimum wage.