THE HOME FROM HOME 41

teen months, gave garden parties, were supposed to
be there for the good of the ruled. It was these men
who had so much to answer for: the wages, for
example, of the platelayers on the little narrow-gauge
line which runs up to Pendembu near the French and
Liberian borders. These men were paid sixpence a
day and had to buy their own food, and yet in the
days of the depression they were docked one day's
pay a month. This was perhaps the meanest economy
among the many mean economies which assisted
Sierra Leone through the depression, a depression
caused by the fall in price of palm oil and palm
kernels, the preference Levers at that time were show-
ing for whale oiL The economies were nearly all at
the expense of the coloured man; government staffs
were reduced by a clerk here and a messenger there.
Until the visit of Lord Plymouth, the Under-Secretary
of State, who arrived in Freetown on the day that I
did, there had been only one sanitary inspector for
the whole colony and protectorate. Badgered by the
central authority, constantly moved from a district
which he was attempting to clean up, he would apply
in vain for assistants. Forced labour is illegal in a
British Colony, but the sanitary inspector without a
staff had to choose between breaking the law or leav-
ing villages as dirty as he found them.

One could exonerate the men in the bar; they were
not guilty of these mealinesses; they were only guilty
of the shabbiness of Freetown, the tin roofs and the
Poppy Day posters. Santayana, with the romanticism
of a foreign Anglophil, has written that "what gov-
erns the Englishman is his inner atmosphere, the
weather in his soul". The inner atmosphere, he ex^