288	JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS
people planted down, without money or a home, on
a coast of yellow fever and malaria to make what they
can of an Africa from which their families have been
torn centuries before. No one can pretend they have
made much of their country, Colonel Davis's conduct
of the Km campaign is only one example of the
horrors of their history, but .to me it seems remark-
able that they have retained their independence at
all: a kind of patriotism has emerged from the graft
and the privation,
England and France in the last century robbed
them of territory; America has done worse, for she
has lent them money. Without any resources of their
own, except what they could squeeze out of the un-
friendly natives in an undeveloped interior, they
have had to borrow again and again. Each fresh loan
has only paid off the previous indebtedness and left
them with a smaller surplus and an inflated interest.
They have tried to build roads before, as they are
trying to build them now, and I had seen outside
Grand Bassa how previous roads had gone backward,
not forward. They once had a telephone system, but
now they have only the leaning poles by the roadside.
They had bought machines, but they hadn't had the
money to work them, and driving out to the rubber
plantations one passed the old dredges rusting in the
scrub. I couldn't wonder at their inanition in the
soaking heat. I remember that one day, going out
to Mount Barclay, we passed a motor-lorry broken
down on the road with one wheel off; there were the
remains of a camp fire and the crew were sleeping in
the bush. It was only twenty miles from Monrovia,
bijt as I went out next day to visit ex-President King