"CIVILISED MAN" 231

on his grey naked feet and a torn pyjama jacket which
had lost most of its buttons. On his head was a kind
of rough-rider's hat, and his eyeballs were yellow and
malarious. All vitality, except a little malice and
covetousness, had been drained out of the half-cast,
who lived here, year in, year out, squeezing taxes out
of the bare village, with no pay but the percentage
he chose to steal. He was officially reckoned civilised
because he could speak English and write his name.

When I came in with my carriers he thought I
was a Government agent and asked me what my
'privileges' were: how many free labourers I was
allowed, how many hampers of rice unpaid for from
this starved village. I said I had no privileges but
wished to buy food for my men.

"Buy?" Mr. Nelson said, "Buy? That's not so
easy." He said with a faint flicker of hatred, "These
people would rather be forced to give than sell/'
Later I photographed him with his wife, an old Gio
woman naked to the waist, and he came and sat
beside me and talked languidly of politics. I spoke
of the coming election. He said that Mr. King had
no chance of re-election, but all his opinion meant
was that he owed his position, if you could call his
dreary exile by that name, to Mr. Barclay's party.
If King succeeded Barclay, even the Nelsons would be
ruined. I asked him about Mr. Faulkner, who con-
tested the election in 1928 against King and who had
started the League of Nations inquiry into slavery.
Mr. Faulkner had won the uneasy respect of every-
one in Liberia; he had refused minor offices in every
Government; he had spent all his own money, earned
as an electrical engineer and the owner of Monrovia's