For the Christian riles and the Aryan smiles,
And he weareth the Christian down;
And the end of that fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph clear, A fool lies here
Who tried to hustle the East.Then gradually, very gradually, and by how slow degrees he shudders in after
days to recall, a change comes o'er the spirit of his nightmare. Almost
unconsciously, he begins to perceive that he is sundered from the people of the
land by a gulf which they can never hope to bridge over. If he is ever to gain
their confidence the work must be of his own doing. They cannot come up to this
level, he must go down to the plains in which they dwell. He must put off many
of the things of the white man, must forget his airs of superiority, and must be
content to be merely a native Chief among natives. His pride rebels, his
prejudices cry out and will not be silenced, he knows that he will be
misunderstood by his race-mates, should they see him among the people of his
adoption, but the aching solitude beats down one and all of these things; and,
like that eminently sensible man, the Prophet Muhammad, he gets him to the
Mountain, since it is immovable and will not come to him.
Then begins a new life. He must start by learning the language of his fellows, as
perfectly as it is given to a stranger to learn it. That is but the first step in a long
and often a weary march. Next, he must study, with the eagerness of Browning's
Grammarian, every native custom, every native conventionality, every one of the
ten thousand ceremonial observances to which natives attach so vast an
importance. He must grow to understand each one of the hints and doubles
ententes, of which Malays make such frequent use, every little mannerism, sign
and token, and, most difficult of all, every motion of the hearts, and every turn of
thought, of those whom he is beginning to call his own people. He must become
conscious of native Public Opinion, which is often diametrically opposed to the
opinion of his race-mates on one and the same subject. He must be able to
unerringly predict how the slightest of his actions will be regarded by the
natives, and he must shape his course accordingly, if he is to maintain his
influence with them, and to win their sympathy and their confidence. He must be
able to place himself in imagination in all manner of unlikely places, and thence
to instinctively feel the native Point of View. That is really the whole secret of
governing natives. A quick perception of their Point of View, under all
conceivable circumstances, a rapid process by which a European places himself