As nationalists debated the justice of the murder, the new consul, Sir Eldon Gorst, urged Roosevelt to stay silent on the assassination. But Roosevelt was not about to shrink from defending Britain's civilizing mission. Soon after arriving in Khartoum on March 14, 1910, Roosevelt delivered three speeches, two in Sudan andEgypt in March and one in Britain in May, that reiterated his previous convictions but presented them more starkly (Burton 1968, 178-79).
Forget preparing the Sudanese or East Africans for self-government, Roosevelt said. Spreading civilization was the highest priority for mankind. In Sudan, that meant making British rule "perpetual" (1910, 3). East Africa, for its part, needed the continued promotion of permanent British settlement. The land "can be made a true white man's country," Roosevelt enthused. Now, as in his pre-presidential years, he proudly alluded to brutality. "No alien race should be permitted to come into competition with the settlers," he said, leaving the means - forced resettlement or extermination - to Londoners' imagi- nation (19Ю, 161-62).12 Nonsettler colonies, for their part, were "totally different." In Sudan, Egypt, and Uganda, as in the Philippines, civilized Westerners had to uplift native savages. However civilization was best spread, that was how to rule.
In governing Egypt, "it is the thing, not the form, which is vital," said Roosevelt (1910, 163, 171).