As a result, the Governors, as a body, won the respect, and even the
reverence, of a great mass of the populace, but gained comparatively
little actual and personal affection. They were subjected to the
jealousy of the fakirs in India, of the witch-doctors in Africa, and of
other dusky fanatics who had been accustomed to oppress the rank and
file of the populace before the advent of the European civilization.
The Dutch pursued a policy very similar to that of the English. They
were essentially just in their rule, and they won the wholesale respect
of the subject races. Their methods of governing, however, were usually
more severe than those of the British, and as a rule the discipline they
enforced was considerably stronger. This has been evidenced in Africa
and elsewhere.
The Iberian system of colonization was in general totally different.
Even the Spaniards, far less spontaneously genial than the Portuguese,
encouraged an intimacy between their colonists and the subject races of
a kind unknown in the Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic circles. It is true that
in the first instance the Spaniards slaughtered hundreds of thousands of
natives. But these wholesale killings were on account of no social
convictions; they were merely the result of an overpowering greed for
gold and of too harsh a method of enforcing labour.
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