  This awkward paternalism is difficult for the contemporary reader to accept. It must be read, though, in the context of the respect he has for the native intelligence in all groups, his fellow blacks included. Agreeing with Mill's caution that force over the native should be that which fits them to become a nation Crummell insists that force should be the force of restoration and progress (“Our National Mistakes,” 185n). In the “native man's moral constitution” is a “great felt need, and a great object of desire [for] peace, order, and protection”; and they are motivated by an acquisitive principle, “the impelling motive power in all [their] endurance and weariness” (191). He understood that there simply was no project without a native African capacity for civilization.