MISSIONARIES BARRED

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Apr 12, 1899

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 25, No. 15.

MISSIONARIES BARRED.

England's Policy as Illustrated in the Soudan.

GENERAL LORD KITCHENER has begun his term of office as dictator of the Soudan by closing that vast dependency of Great Britain and of Egypt to missionary enterprises for some time to come. Both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant missionary societies had made preparations to resume without delay their operations in that portion of Central Africa which they were forced to abandon some fifteen years ago by the Dervish insurrection. But Lord Kitchener has now announced that he cannot for the present permit any missionary work in the Soudan, and that he is determined to have time to organize the administration of his vast satrapy upon a solid basis before allowing missionaries to re-enter the country.

Not only has his action in the matter received the full approval of the British Government, but the latter has likewise, through the agency of Lord Cromer, its plenipotentiary in Egypt, assured the native chiefs and sheiks at Omdurman, at Berber, and at other important cities on the Upper Nile, that there will be no interference by the English with their Mohammedan faith and religious customs, which will be strictly respected. Lord Cromer even went so far as to promise the people of the Soudan that these pledges, which he was making to them in the name of Queen Victoria, whom he justly described as ruling over a larger number of Moslem subjects than any other monarch in the world, comprised the application of Mohammedan sacred law, and, as a guarantee of England's good faith in the matter, informed them that the money which the British people, from the queen downward, had contributed toward the foundation and endowment of the great college, which is to constitute the most appropriate and worthy memorial of General Gordon at Khartoum, had been subscribed on the express understanding that it would be devoted exclusively to the technical education of the natives, and that there should be nothing in the course of its instruction that might be calculated to wean them from the faith of their fathers. In one word, England, having undertaken the gigantic task of evolving law, order, and prosperity out of the chaos and anarchy that have devastated the Soudan for the last fifteen years, has resolved to set up in that portion of Central Africa which is watered by the Nile, not a Christian form of government, but a Mohammedan one, as being best suited to meet the requirements of the situation and to restore peace and happiness to that great territory which has been so rightly described as "The Sad Soudan."

This may be said to indicate an entirely new departure in the policy of Great Britain. It is the inevitable outcome, and the result of nearly three centuries of experience on the part of England in dealing with the Asiatic and African races, and, inasmuch as John Bull is admittedly pre-eminent and a past master in the most difficult art of governing non-Christian countries, since of all the oriental and African colonies of the other European powers his alone are prosperous, flourishing, and contented, it is a step which must commend itself with particular interest to the people of the United States at the moment when they are about to undertake the task of administering the government of the Philippine Islands, inhabited for the greater part by the most fanatical of Moslems.—Cor. N. Y. Tribune.

[We sincerely hope that the United States will not fall in with any such commendations. The only thing for governments to do is to follow the principles upon which this government is founded—i. e., to leave all questions of religion to the individual's own conscience. Any other course will prove disastrous.—ED.]