The gutenberg galaxy 123 so that in a generation, human characteristics and reactions have altered to a degree which one would have expected to have taken centuries. The high qualities of the African untouched by missions or education impress nearly everyone. Those of this district are good workers, cheerful, uncomplaining, unaffected by monotony or discomforts, honest and usually remarkably truthful But it is not uncommon to hear uncomplimentary comparisons made between those Africans and those born of Christian parents or those who started school at an early age. A writer, however, who visited schools in Madagascar says that these untouched children are naturally lethargic. They sit still too long: the impulse to play seems to be dormant. They are impervious to monotony and their mental lethargy enables them to perform, for children, prodigious acts of endurance. These children naturally develop into the uneducated African, who is incapable of filling any skilled post. At the most he can be trained to carry out work that requires no reasoning. That is the penalty paid for his good qualities. The African will remain in permanent servitude if only to ignorance unless there is willingness to risk the destruction of those qualities in the changes education brings and a desire to face building up his character again but with a totally different mentality. This different mentality may show itself in a shirking of work, trouble over food or in a desire to have his wife living with him however difficult for the employer. The reasons are clear; the African’s whole capacity for interest, pleasure and pain are immensely increased through even a little education. For the educated African (using this term for even the comparatively low standard achieved by the average African schoolboy) the sense of interest has been aroused through the new variety of life and monotony has become a trial to him as it is to the normal European. It takes greater will-power for him to be faithful to uninteresting work, and lack of interest brings fatigue. The author next turned to the changed attitudes to taste and sex and pain resulting from literacy: I suggest also that the nervous system of the untouched African is so lethargic that he needs little sleep. Many of our workmen walk some miles to their jobs, work well all day and then return home and spend most of the night