Chapter 4

THE EARLY DAYS OF SETTLEMENT

" The establishment merely of a protectorate does not entitle the protecting Power to deal with private rights to land in the protected territory, and any such power must be based upon express grant or acquiescence on the part of the local Government."

M. T. LINDLEY : The Acquisition and Government of Backward

Territory in International Law, p. 321 (1926).

"When the Whitemen first came we did not understand that we were to be deprived of any of our land, nor that they had really come to stay. A small piece of land here and there was sold to a few of the first pioneers and to one or two Missions voluntarily by its owners in the time of the I.B.E.A. Company. When the British Government took over the administration of the country we still were unaware that our possession of our land would be questioned or challenged.

" Then from about the year 1902 increasing numbers of Whitemen arrived, and portions of our land began to be given out to them for farms, until large areas in Kyambu, Limoru, Kikuyu, Mbagathi, about Nairobi, and at Ruiru and beyond, had been disposed of in this way. These lands were not bought from their Kikuyu owners, and any compensation they received (for land actually under cultivation only, and at an extremely small rate per acre) was quite inadequate. The Natives on them had either to become squatters (on what had been their own land) or else move off. Many of them to-day are squatters on up-country European estates and many have become wanderers, moving from one estate to another."

EXTRACT FROM A MEMORANDUM PRESENTED TO THE PARLIAMENTARY COMMISSION

IN NOVEMBER 1924 BY THE KIKUYU (NATIVE) ASSOCIATION.

" Fort Smith " to-day is a settler's farm. It lies some five miles to the West of Nairobi and close to a Church of England Mission station. Nowadays, young English girls ride, entirely unattended, on bicycles along the surrounding roads which have supplemented, but not displaced, the steep native tracks of the district. Even as late as 1904 travellers on these tracks might have found themselves suddenly marching into a herd of elephant. The traveller of to-day will have to go some 120 miles from Nairobi to the North-East of Mount Kenya for any chance of such an experience. (This he can do by motor, in a few hours' run from Nairobi.)

In 1897 Fort Smith was a fort. The sole European residents were three young officers of the Protectorate Service and the East Africa Rifles. Outside their boma or fort, complete with its moat, rampart and bastions, stood a landmark called " the thousand-yard tree." It was a station instruction that no one was to go beyond it without an escort of rifles. The tribesmen had been turbulent. The Company's famous outpost of Dagoreti, only a few miles away and by this time abandoned, had been invested by hostile Kikuyu natives. It stood a short siege until the supplies of the garrison gave out, and was then evacuated by night. The garrison was guided in safety across the hostile territory by a Kikiiyu-Masai half-caste named Kinyanjiii. His help was recognized by Government at a later date, when he was appointed paramount chief of the Kikuyu tribe in that locality, which office he still holds (in 1927). Although native unrest on this occasion simmered down quickly, the district remained for some years unsafe for unknown Europeans travelling alone. Even in the most troubled times, certain Europeans, well known to and trusted by the natives, were able to wander at will, unattended, among the native villages. At that time in Kikuyu, as later among the Nandi, the natives discriminated between individual Europeans, and did not class them all as a single group of aggressors. In a less degree this same discrimination between trusted and untrusted immigrants prevails to-day, guided by unexpected standards and quaint intuitions. In complete ignorance of the scale of values by which white men were judged, it was a wise precaution which limited the unattended wanderings of staff and visitors at Fort Smith to the " thousand-yard tree " outside the boma.

Two hundred miles or more down-country, " railhead " was creeping forward across desert and through scrub jungle. To the scattered residents up-country," rails " were a source of unending anecdote and of visions of a transformed country. To the Uganda Railway engineers the advance of railhead meant ultimate escape from drought, dust and tropical heat, and entry into the interior highlands, teeming with game and possessing a climate of which men, returning from survey parties working far in advance of rails, brought glowing accounts. The swarming earthwork gangs with their thousands of Indian coolies, the platelayers, the bridge-builders, the commissariat staff charged with the feeding of this industrial army in its advance through a wilderness devoid of supplies and in many parts devoid of water the medical and sanitary control, the traffic and loco, staffs all worked as one team, pushing railhead Westward into the interior with glorious disregard of all the problems of statecraft which were soon to emerge as a direct result of their labours. The wild life and the insect life of Africa exacted their toll, but the morning stars sang together to the scattered groups of white strangers in the land who romped at every dawn into a fresh day's work, implanting the means of rapid transit upon a tiny ribbon of African soil where man had, since the dawn of time, only walked before. For those who were privileged to have a share in carrying out that project, the traverse of the glorious highlands of East Africa provided an experience of incomparable charm, as railhead forged across the breezy prairies and nosed its way up and across mountain ranges to its halting-place beside that vast expanse of Nile water, the Victoria Nyanza, the largest of the lakes of Africa. The Railway engineers were in a new world. For the Administration officers through whose domain the Railway crept, it was a changed world. The Railway immediately brought them a challenge. Once again an isolated group of gentlemen-adventurers from Britain were to face the old conflict of principle and expediency-were to balance the promptings of self-interest against the upholding of high traditions. It is always easy to appreciate the requirements and support the claims of those, especially if they are one's own countrymen, who are socially and politically influential, well organized and clamorous. Only those who are clear-minded and resolute can consistently maintain the cause of strangers who are inarticulate, unorganized and devoid of both political power and aspirations.

Even before the Railway had reached the point where Nairobi, the capital, now stands, a few families of settlers had entered the highlands and were looking round for a locality in which they could acquire and farm land. These parties, after travelling the short distance up the then completed line to railhead, went on by daily marches into the interior, and one family-the McQueens -walked into Uganda and back before it settled in the Kikuyu country: a notable exploit for individuals encumbered with babies and supported by neither missionary organization nor commercial Company. Earlier still, a very few sportsmen had penetrated into the interior, and they returned to Europe with stories of an abundance and variety of big game unequalled anywhere else m the world. Some of these hunters made prolonged visits up-country, and were able to send down tons of elephant ivory, in the first case to the coast and later to wayside railway stations, where the ivory was usually sold to Indian traders. One afternoon in 1898 the District Officer in charge of the inland station of Machakos was informed by his wife that there had just arrived upon the verandah a singularly dishevelled traveller who announced himself as Lord Delamere. After tea with this Mr. and Mrs. Ainsworth, Lord Delamere excused himself from returning for dinner on the grounds of the disrepair and scantiness of his outfit. He had not known when he first called that " there were any ladies in the station." He had come South through Jubaland and Tanaland by camel and porter caravans, and was now proceeding to meet the railway construction parties as they approached the site of Nairobi, and so go on to Mombasa. His camp exhibited all the evidences of a dashing and adventurous journey through wild country, and next morning he moved away Southward with his companion, Dr. Atkinson. Latter-day sportsmen travel with more luxury, but not often with a keener spirit of adventure. Their visits " out of the blue " to remote Government stations have long ago ceased to be the rarity that they were in 1898, as also has the presence of " ladies in the station."

Early travellers saw something of what is termed inter-tribal warfare, and accounts of it perhaps received undue prominence in their writings. It is easy to exaggerate the extent and severity of tribal warfare. These affrays were nothing much more than a series of border quarrels, conducted for the purpose of, or in retaliation for, thefts of produce or stock. Within the tribal borders the bulk of the native population lived at peace. No majestic impis moved across the country. Heavy fighting on a tribal scale rarely took place. The Masai did make forays in some strength, but, except when sections of this tribe were fighting each other, their operations were nothing more than cattle raids, skilfully planned to take unsuspecting stock-holders of other tribes by surprise. In a short time these activities were supressed. The story of the swift pacification of a medley of hostile tribes, continuing from the point where Sir Frederick Lugard's narrative1 (1 The Rise of Our East African Empire.   (Blackwood, 1893.)) ends, still awaits its competent chronicler. Many a little episode of prompt retaliation for " Government orders " Regarded : many a tense evening spent in tiny Government posts and outposts round which doubled sentries crouched, cursmg the setting of the moon or the overclouding of stars, as they competently discriminated between the whirr of semi-audible noises that constitute the "silence" of their tropical night: many an exploit of superhuman self-assurance by youngsters doing their job in conditions to which no predecessor's experience extended and where no manual of instructions could guide- these and the little dotted cemeteries of one or two graves, dating from occasions when inspiration gave out just when luck was at its blackest, or recording defeat in a long-drawn struggle by some mother's son against disease and isolation, go to make up the skeleton of a story that ended in one district after another before settlers entered it. In 1899 the picturesque spit of land between the Thika and Chania rivers, upon which the Blue Posts Hotel now stands, was the scene of a pitched battle with Kikuyu tribesmen. The Government camp was rushed and a Government veterinary officer was killed. The Railway surveyors in working through the Kikuyu country were occasionally molested, and rifle and theodolite were equally necessary articles of equipment in the field. As late as May 1902 a small column consisting of 50 Police and 500 Masai irregulars left Naivasha station on a short and effective expedition against disaffected Kikuyu. In 1903 Muhoroni at mile 547 on the Railway was the base of operations against the Nandi tribe in the settlement of a rising " which need never have occurred if more restraint had been shown by emissaries of Government at one critical stage of preliminary misunderstandings. Baringo botna, the country's  Northernmost inland station, was invested by Suk natives for five days. Many a dashing little relief expedition moved about the map in those days. Up to 1905 the country to the North of Mount Kenya and the Tana River remained a " closed district," with the result that the early waves of settlement passed it by, so that it still remains the least penetrated area of choice land in native occupation.

There were not wanting among the pioneer arrivals in this new country some admixture of men whose independence and self-reliance bordered on lawlessness. Dick's exploit in the Rift Valley, which is related in Chapter VIII, of waging war, single-handed, against the Masai tribe for one crowded day' whose sunset he did not live to see, may well take rank, for sheer bravado and desperation, with anything that is recorded of Sir Richard Grenville or many another buccaneer of romance. The choir-stalls in the Cathedral at Mombasa are consecrated to the memory of this berserk filibuster and Chief Accountant of the old Imperial Company-Andrew Dick.  A prompt arrest and trial of three exuberant European travellers in 1903 on a charge of dacoity resulted in an acquittal of the accused, but may have been of effect in bringing home to the over-adventurous spirits among the newcomers the fact that scattered, but at times effective, machinery of Government had been established, even in remote corners of the Protectorate. On the other hand, many of the incoming settlers were absurdly timid. The local paper in 1903, commenting on a Government proposal to build a £3,000 school for European children in Nairobi, expressed the hope that it would be provided with a strong high wall all round it, to protect the children while at play from attack by Masai or Wakikuyu. Even as late as 1905 a body of settlers from Nairobi and its neighbourhood sent a memorial to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, presenting a highly coloured version of the dangers with which they imagined themselves to be surrounded, and imploring protection, by the erection of forts or otherwise ; while more or less earnest suggestions for the disarming of all the native tribes, in the interests of the safety of European immigrants, and without any regard for the safety of the natives in a country infested by dangerous animals, were advanced, at intervals, from the earliest times of settlement. Government was thus faced with the solution of troubles arising from the extreme members both of the adventurous and the timid groups among the newcomers. Both these difficult sections were treated with much toleration and suavity.

Reverting to the year 1902, the situation in the Protectorate was that the Uganda Railway had been opened for public traffic completely across it from East to West. The first locomotive had run through to the shores of the Victoria Nyanza on December 20th, 1901. The majority of the European residents not connected with Government were missionaries. Others, to the number of a few dozen, were farming, trading or travelling as sportsmen or prospectors. The volume of traffic on the Railway v.as trifling. The published traffic returns for the years 1901 and 1902 show that only about 12,000 tons of general merchandise were carried in the year, and that one through train a week provided for all public business.

The Railway authorities issued a profusely illustrated handbook upon the attractions of their already famous line,1 (1 The Unganda Railway, British East Africa and the Great Lake; Waterlow and Sons), and arranged with Messrs. Thos. Cook & Sons for the issue of through tickets from Europe to the source of the Nile. The number of visitors steadily increased-some sightseers, some sportsmen and some bent upon acquiring land. A large proportion of these last quite naturally selected the country round Nairobi as the site of their applications. Land in the immediate vicinity of the capital was likely to rise in value. The climate for the greater part of the year seemed to be as delightful as that of the Highlands of Scotland in August. The country to the West and North of the town was well watered and had quite recently been, for the most part, under native occupation. The soil was magnificent, and there were two rainy seasons in every normal year-at about March and November. The former native occupants were for the most part dead. As the Railway engineers had good reason to know, the majority of the native population had perished during the years 1898 and 1899 by a famine, unparalleled within native memory, due to the failure of three rainy seasons in succession -a drought of nearly eighteen months' duration. It was contended by survivors that three out of every four of the Kikuyu residents in an extensive stretch of country had died, either from famine or from pestilence, chiefly smallpox, following upon it. Thin bush, such as always springs up in a season or two when land is left to lie fallow, was all that remained for the European settler to remove in order to provide himself with a shamba (plantation) of immediate utility. The official defence for giving this land away to settlers is contained in an annual report by the Commissioner of the Protectorate, Sir Charles Eliot: "... But in the last famine large plantations were abandoned, and subsequently the owners, instead of attempting to repair the damage done to their lands, went to other districts." It is quite true that there were family concentrations, transfers and removals. It was impossible for one quarter of the previous population to maintain the entire tribal holding under cultivation.

The allotment of farms in this region continued at an accelerated pace in 1903. For the most part these farms were of one square mile in area. The fact that the local Government had taken no steps to facilitate the examination, selection and allotment of land to new arrivals from overseas gave rise to much bitter comment among them, and early in 1903 there were complaints in the local Press that " upwards of twenty-five white men " were unable to get land.  It was rumoured that Lord Delamere was to be appointed a Government Land Agent to solve the problems of settlement, but Sir Charles Eliot reported to the Foreign Office in June of that year that the former had abandoned his idea of entering the Government Service, and that he applied for a free grant of 156 square miles of leasehold land instead.  The terms upon which this was applied for were that it should be leasehold land paying rent for a term of ninety-nine years at the annual rate of one halfpenny an acre, with the proviso that if the recipient conducted development and improvement upon it to the average extent of one shilling an acre, he should be allowed to purchase the freehold at a price of eightpence an acre.  The Foreign Office disallowed the proposal as to purchase of freehold, but sanctioned the grant of 100,000 acres on lease, expressing agreement with Sir Charles Eliot, the Commissioner, that it was " very desirable to encourage persons of position and capital to settle or take an interest in East Africa, though it was thought that His Majesty's Government should be very careful how they alienated large tracts to persons who were not specially fitted or able to develop them. . . ."   One English farmer received a freehold estate of some 2,000 acres close to Nairobi, which he worked as a lucrative dairy farm for ten or a dozen years and then sold for more than £20,000 as a building estate.   One of the senior engineers of the Railway Service, Mr. R. Barton Wright, accepted a transfer to the position of Land and Survey Officer, a position which rapidly became one of the most thankless and onerous in the Protectorate Service.  As Sir Charles Eliot explained later to the Foreign Office, no financial provision was made for meeting any of the requirements resulting from the arrival of settlers until each contingency in turn actually arose.   There was no preparation in advance, even when the local Government sent one of its senior officers, the Chief of Customs, to South Africa for the purpose, inter alia, of advertising the Protectorate as a field for European settlement.  The facilities which existed for travel by rail across 300 miles of attractive highland country enabled large numbers ot land prospectors to operate simultaneously over a widespread area, and thereby increased the difficulties of a small survey staff.  " The Land Laws here are about the most liberal in the world,  said the local paper in June 1903.   Government officials also applied for plots in and around Nairobi.   Land outside the townships could be bought freehold for 2s. 8d. an acre.

A land boom began.   The selling price of small residential plots, of a few acres in size, near Nairobi, bounced up £200 in a fortnight.   Applications poured in from Europe, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand and America by every mail and also by cable.   Every steamer brought its quota of intending settlers. The growing crowd soon overran the limits of Nairobi's accommodation and a canvas village, locally called Tentfontein, sprang up near the Land Office in the valley of the River Nairobi. The Land Office was besieged daily by applicants pressing for the allotment and survey of farms, many of them having come back hot-foot from exploratory marches in districts remote from the Railway, quoting place-names which existed on no maps and of which the small and violently overworked Land Office staff had never heard.   Before the end of 1903 the Land Office was 400,000 acres in arrears with its surveys, though locally engaged surveyors as well as its own staff were at work. More exasperating than mere delays in survey, the Land Office staff were frequently unable to say definitely whether areas were or were not to be regarded as under native occupation. They found it impossible on the one hand to grant or to refuse applications, and on the other hand to elicit from Government any definite orders as to which lands were to be reserved from alienation and retained for native use or for Forest Reserves, and which were to be definitely and without question thrown open for European occupation.  They were in some instances offered bribes to expedite business, on which occasions heated scenes occurred in the Land Office, and negotiations terminated abruptly. It was a common aggravation of the position that discontented applicants at the Land Office were allowed to transfer their pressure to the office of the Commissioner, where promises were often made which conflicted strangely with the powers which were supposed to be exercised at the Land Office.  (More than one Commissioner of the Protectorate has courted local popularity by overriding the decisions of his senior officers, given by them in strict accordance with instructions received from him.)   Out in the districts, a number of sporadic disputes were in progress between Administration officers and surveyors, the latter, under pressure from clamorous applicants, seeking authority to survey as farms many areas of apparently unoccupied land which the former asserted to be under native ownership, to have been under recent cultivation and to be merely lying fallow prior to early re-cultivation.   The Administration officers were ordinarily overruled by higher authority, and a broad wedge of European occupation was driven across the lands of the Kikuyu. The scattered and spiritless survivors of the great famine of 1898-99 and their numerous descendants to-day regard much of this settlement as an encroachment on lands under well-established native ownership. The whole story of this period is one of precipitate Government action, followed up by no clear definition of policy, no considered scheme of action, no provision of facilities for public servants who strove honourably, and in very invidious circumstances, to deal with a situation which would have taxed an organization far larger than anything of which they had control. It is the old story of the conscientious official placed in an impossible position and left to face the music-a story which is probably repeated, with variations, in the history of every one of our Colonial Dependencies.

The collective discussion of the settlers' aspirations and troubles was put on an organized basis. An " Association " of European colonists in the highlands was formed, three of the members being clergymen. A meeting of five members took place at Mr. Wood's Hotel on August ist, 1903. There were internal dissensions and an early split, rival branches meeting at Nairobi and Kikuyu, while complaints crept into the papers of " the continual pulling to pieces of past resolutions and the framing of fresh ones " -a practice which has flourished in Kenya long subsequent to 1903.

Sir Clement Hill, the Superintendent of African Protectorates at the Foreign Office, had made an extended tour in the Protectorate at the end of 1900. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, when Secretary of State for the Colonies, made a brief tour in the Protectorate at the end of 1902. His visit raised many hopes, as there was already considerable agitation in the country for transfer from Foreign Office rule to that of the Colonial Office. However, the first definite result from the visit was an offer by the Home Government of some thousands of square miles of country lying to the North of the Railway as a national home for the Jewish race. The Zionist Congress sitting in 1903 at Basel was divided in its opinion upon the offer, but decided by 295 votes to 177 to send a committee of investigators to the Protectorate. In the long run the offer was not accepted.

The proposal had received general support in England, even from the Morning Post, but it evoked a volume of strongly hostile opinion in the Protectorate.  The Planters' and Farmers' Association, of which Lord Delamere had by this time become President, with his former exploring companion Dr. Atkinson and the Rev. Dr. Scott as Vice-Presidents, submitted an adverse resolution to the local Government, and Lord Delamere, who had applied for land in the same area, cabled home :-

" Feeling here very strong against introduction alien Jews. Railway frontage fit for British colonization 260 miles. Foreign Office proposes give 200 miles best to undesirable aliens. Is it for this that the expensive railway was built and large sums spent on country ? Flood of people that class sure to lead to trouble with half-tamed natives jealous of their rights. Means extra staff to control them. Is British taxpayer, proprietor East Africa, content that beautiful and valuable country be handed to aliens ? Have we no colonists of our own race ? Country being settled slowly surely by desirable British colonial settlers. Englishmen here appeal public opinion, especially those who know this country, against this arbitrary proceeding and consequent swamping bright future of country."

He also wrote and published a pamphlet on the subject.1 (1 The Grant of Land to the Zionist Congress and Land Settlement in British East Africa (Harrison & Sons, London, 1903) It was while this agitation was in progress that a visit, in a private capacity, was paid to the Protectorate by Lord Milner, then on his way home from South Africa.

Life in the Protectorate in these days was, at any rate, not dull. It can easily be understood that those land applicants who were in the country lived, for the most part, in a mood of exasperation. Officials were found to defend native rights to much of the most eligible land, and even to uphold " Forest Reserves." The very existence of land laws was obnoxious to some of these applicants for land grants. There was evidence enough of divided counsels in the Government ranks. The Land Office appeared to be overwhelmed, as it nearly was, and while indecision appeared to prevail in the highest Government quarters, there were confident reports coming out from England of the grant of enormous areas to syndicates there, or to an alien nation.

In the conditions of strain and dissatisfaction which generally prevailed there arose the first threat of rebellion under arms against the local Government, which was to be revived with such effect in later days 2 (2 V. Chapter XXI) What directly led up to it was trouble in connection with the land of the Masai tribe. Early in 1904, the Commissioner reported that "200 per cent, of the Masai grazing grounds had been applied for."  The Foreign Office, which had granted an area of 500 square miles to a powerful syndicate in London, insisted resolutely upon his not encroaching further upon the lands of the Masai to the extent of making further grants of about 30,000 acres of land in use by them to individual applicants in the Protectorate. It was at this time that some of the more forceful of the settlers talked openly of " taking down their rifles and settling the matter " (of native occupation of desirable lands)'' out of hand." This impressed Sir Charles Eliot sufficiently to lead him to report to the Foreign Office on April 5th, 1904, that he foresaw " a formidable danger that if the Masai were kept in the best land close to the Railway, and if Europeans, who could make better use of the land and the Railway, settled all round them, the position would not be tolerated and would soon result in a sort of Jameson raid." It is to be noted that talk of this nature had evidently risen to prominence in the month of March, a month notorious in the annals of the Protectorate- as will duly appear. He had two alternatives for meeting this situation. The first was to accustom the Masai by slow degrees to the presence of European landholders in their vicinity. If the Masai did not quarrel with a few Europeans the latter might then be given " greater facilities." The second was to remove the natives altogether and leave their lands to the Europeans. The idea that the natives should remain unmolested on their lands would not appear to have been regarded as a sufficiently practicable course to merit separate mention as a third alternative.

Interesting Government despatches, by mail and cable, were passing at this time. A selection of them was subsequently published by Government as a White Paper.'(1 Africa No. 8, 1904, Cd. 2099.) Sir Charles Eliot's complaint against the Secretary of State, of taking serious action over his head without intimation to him, was, it appeared, echoed by his own senior officers, who preferred the same complaint as to his attitude towards them. He had cabled a threat of resignation unless he were allowed liberty of action in the matter of certain land grants, and the Secretary of State held him to it with the result that he left the Protectorate in 1904. '

After a short interregnum, he was succeeded by Sir Donald Stewart, K.C.M.G., C.B. Within a fortnight of his reaching -Nairobi, he rescinded the sanction which had previously prevailed for officials to acquire land in the Protectorate.  Those who had secured allotments, and had also completed some measure of development or improvement, were allowed to retain them. Others were instructed to surrender their land. All applications which were under consideration at the time were disallowed.

The story, so far, has been one of the occupation by some Europeans of the property of African natives, and this with the assistance of Government, and the settlement of other Europeans upon vacant land to which Government gave them not only safe access but also secure titles. The Government created a caste of landed proprietors-a privileged class. Its members can certainly not be blamed for accepting the chances of wealth which a British Government placed before them. Later chapters will describe the subsequent behaviour of different sections of this small but expanding community. There will be much in the record to rouse indignation among British people who have not been subjected to the temptations inseparable from membership of a privileged class, allowed to enrich itself by the labours of uneducated coloured people. Let them remember, as they read, that the people who are being described are, for the most part, just such people as themselves and their friends. Difference of experience does so profoundly govern difference of outlook. On the other side, the privileged class in Kenya would do well to remember that it is the British people, and not themselves, who are in charge of the country in which they live and of the Africans among whom they dwell. If the British people have good reason to believe that African natives who are in their charge are being imposed upon, it is probable that wrongs will be righted. Attempts from any quarter to obstruct the process may provide some temporary excitement, but are unlikely to have any permanent success.

Before this book appears in print it is probable that an agitation will have been launched for transferring the control and guardianship of two and a half million Africans in Kenya from an Office of State in London, answerable to Parliament, to a group of about 8,000 adult Europeans in the Colony, every one of whom stands to the African in the relation of employer to employed.  The history of the relations of these two groups during the last quarter of a century may be of use in enabling the British public to come to an informed decision as to the wisdom of surrendering, or, on the other hand, of retaining legislative and administrative control of the mixture of national groups which have made homes, of varying degrees of permanence, in the Colony.