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Marketing Digital Guía Básica para Digitalizar Tu Empresa 1st Edition Josep Martínez Polo - María Concepción Parra Meroño - Jesús Martínez Sánchez
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Marketing digital
Marketing digital
Guía básica para digitalizar
tu empresa
Josep M. Martínez Polo
Jesús Martínez Sánchez
M. Concepción Parra Meroño
Director de la colección Manuales (comunicación): Lluís Pastor
© Josep Manuel Martínez Polo, Jesús Martínez Sánchez y M. Concepción Parra Meroño, del texto
ISBN: 978-84-9064-839-1
Ninguna parte de esta publicación, incluyendo el diseño general y de la cubierta, puede ser copiada, reproducida, almacenada o transmi-
tida de ninguna forma ni por ningún medio, ya sea eléctrico, químico, mecánico, óptico, de grabación, de fotocopia o por otros métodos,
sin la autorización previa por escrito de los titulares del copyright.
Autores
Índice
7
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
objetivos.................................................................................. 51
5. ¿Cómo podemos visualizar los datos?............................... 53
6. Kit de herramientas del analista web................................. 54
7. ¿Qué se necesita para ser analista web?............................. 55
Para saber más: Entrevista a Alberto Martín
(Axel Springer)....................................................................... 58
Bibliografía................................................................................... 62
8
© Editorial UOC Índice
9
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
10
© Editorial UOC Índice
11
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
Capítulo I
El comportamiento de los consumidores
ha cambiado y ahora todo es marketing
13
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
14
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
2 Desde el punto de vista del marketing, la demanda hace referencia a los con-
sumidores, tanto actuales como futuros.
15
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
16
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
17
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
4 Levitt (1975).
18
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
19
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
20
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
21
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
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© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
23
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
MARKETING MIX
PÚBLICO OBJETIVO
24
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
7 Santesmases (2012).
25
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
26
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
27
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
9 Bennet (1995).
28
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
10 Santesmases (2012).
11 Stanton y Etzel (2007) y Fischer y Espejo (2004).
29
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
30
© Editorial UOC Capítulo I. El comportamiento de los consumidores…
31
© Editorial UOC Marketing digital
32
Another random document with
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As for Mr. Trimblerigg, having found that there was no public for it, he
relinquished goodness of the first water, and fell back upon relative
goodness and relative truth, in which, as a matter of fact, he had a
more instinctive belief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Intimations of Immortality
WHEN nations which preach Christianity go to war, their truth has
necessarily to become relative; they cannot tell the truth about
themselves; they cannot tell the truth about their enemies; still less
can they tell the truth about Christianity. For doing that last, a Free
Church minister in a certain land of hope and glory lying West,—he
had merely issued the Sermon on the Mount as a circular—was
tarred and feathered as a demonstration of Christian-mindedness by
his belligerent fellow-countrymen. And nearly everybody said that it
served him right.
So when Relative Truth became a spiritual as well as a military
necessity, Mr. Trimblerigg, the inventor of the doctrine in its most
modern form, came gloriously into his own. In other words he
became the fashion.
The War gave him the time and the opportunity of his life. He had
begun by adopting—first pacifism, then benevolent neutrality; but he
saw quickly that there was not a public for either. And as he listened
to the heart-beats of his countrymen roused for battle, a quick
application of his doctrine of Relative Truth restored his mind to
sanity. After that he never wavered; and though he often spoke with
two voices, one day telling the workers, whom he was sent to preach
to, that they were heroes, and another that they were slackers, and
victims of drink; one day demonstrating that the National Executive’s
action had always come just too late, another that it had always
come miraculously up to time; one day protesting the mildness and
equity of his country’s intentions toward those who were
unnecessarily prolonging the war, another—when prospects began
to look brighter—threatening things of a much more drastic
character, in terms drawn from the prize-ring; though thus from day
to day and week to week, he spoke in varied tones, fitting himself to
the occasion, always a forefront figure, occasionally pushing others
out of his way; nevertheless his motive and aim remained constant
(nor when nations go to war is anything more necessary for their
salvation)—the ardent assertion, namely, of the absolute
righteousness of his country’s cause, and of the blameless
antecedents leading up to it.
And though Mr. Trimblerigg’s truth was often extremely relative, it
was nearly always successful; and if any man by tireless energy,
resilient spirits, continuous ubiquity in pulpit and on platform,
alertness, invention, suggestiveness, adaptability, rapid change of
front in the ever-shifting tactics of propaganda,—now conciliatory
and defensive, meek but firm; now whole-heartedly aggressive and
vision-clear of coming victory—if by such qualities, richly and rapidly
blended outside the direct line of fire, any man could ever be said to
have won a war, in a larger and wider sense than the little drummer
boy who lays down his life for his drum,—that compliment might
have been paid, when all was done, to the unbloodstained Mr.
Trimblerigg,—and was.
In the person of Mr. Trimblerigg the Free Evangelical Church had
lifted up its head and neighed like a war-horse, saying among the
trumpets, ha! ha! to the thunder of the captains and the shouting:
and in the person of Mr. Trimblerigg thanks were publicly tendered to
it, when all the fighting was over. And though Mr. Trimblerigg
received neither title, nor outward adornment, nor emolument, he
became, from that day on, a figure of international significance,—the
first perhaps since great old combative Martin Luther, to attain so
high and controversial a prominence in divided Christendom on his
spiritual merits alone.
It may sound cynical to say that the greatness of nations has very
largely been built up on the lies they have told of each other. And yet
it is a true statement; for you have only to compare their histories,
and especially the histories of their wars (upon which young patriots
are trained to become heroes), in order to realize that the day of
naked and unashamed truth has not yet arrived: that so long as
nations stand to be worshipped, and flags to be fought for, truth can
only be relative. From which it follows that while nations are at war
too much truth is bad for them; and not only for them but for religion
also. And that is where and why Mr. Trimblerigg found his place, and
fitted it so exactly. I leave it at that. He became a national hero; and
truly it was not from lack of courage or conviction that he had seen
no fighting. He was short, and fat, and over forty; and his oratorical
gifts were more valuable where the sound of gunfire did not drown
them; otherwise he would have preached his gospel of the relative
beatitudes as willingly from the cannon’s mouth as from anywhere.
A day came, gunfire having ended, when he, and an Archbishop,
and a Prime Minister all stood on a platform together, and spoke to
an exalted gathering too glittering in its rank and distinction to be
called an assembled multitude, though its mere numbers ran into
thousands. The Archbishop sat in the middle; and the two ministers,
the political and the spiritual, sat on either side of him; and if they
were not as like each other as two peas, and did not, by both
speaking at once, rattle together like peas upon a drum, they were
nevertheless birds very much of a feather; and when it came to the
speaking, they fitted each other wonderfully. The Archbishop came
first and spoke well; the Prime Minister followed and spoke better;
Mr. Trimblerigg came last and spoke best of all. The audience told
him so; there was no doubt of it. Field-Marshals and Rear-Admirals
applauded him, Duchesses waved their handkerchiefs at him; a
Dowager-Countess, of Low Church antecedents, became next day a
member of the Free Evangelicals; the mere strength of his
personality had converted her.
Mr. Trimblerigg might well think after this that a visible halo, though
not necessary, had it reappeared just then, would not have come
amiss. From his point of view the meeting could not have been more
successful; he went down from the platform more famous than when
he went up on it. And it was not his speech alone that did it: it was in
the air.
The great Napoleon was said to have a star: Mr. Trimblerigg had an
atmosphere; and though it was not really the larger of the two, to his
contemporaries on earth it seemed larger.
It was just about this time, when Mr. Trimblerigg was obviously
becoming a candidate for national honours after his death, that he
attended the public funeral of a great Free Church statesman whose
war-winning activities had been closely associated with his own. And
as of the two, Mr. Trimblerigg had played the larger part, the
prophetic inference was obvious; and though in that high-vaulted
aisle, amid uniforms and decorations and wands of office, his
demure little figure looked humble and unimportant, he was a
marked man for the observation of all who had come to observe.
It was an occasion on which Free Churchmen had reason to feel
proud. Impelled by the feeling of the nation—still in its early days of
gratitude before victory had begun to taste bitter—the Episcopal
Church had opened her doors to receive, into that place of highest
honour, the dust of one who had lived outside her communion and
politically had fought against her. But it was dust only (ashes, that is
to say); and while to Mr. Trimblerigg’s perception the whole
ceremony, the music, the ritual, the vestments, the crape-scarved
uniforms, and the dark crowd of celebrities which formed a
background, were deeply impressive in their beauty and symbolism,
the little casket of cremated ashes at the centre of it all was not.
In that forced economizing of space, the sense of the individual
personality had been lost, or brought to insignificance. It gave him an
uncomfortable feeling; he did not like it; he wondered why. So long
as his thoughts went linked with the indwelling genius of that temple
of famous memories he felt thrilled and edified; but whenever his eye
returned to the small casket, he experienced a repeated shock and
felt discomfited. The condition here imposed, to make national
obsequies possible, seemed to him not merely a humiliating one; it
spelt annihilation; what remained had ceased to be personal. The
temple became a museum; in it with much ceremony an exhibit was
being deposited in its case.
And so, pondering deeply on these things, he returned home; and
added to his will (signing and dating it with a much earlier date) an
instruction for his executors, ‘My body is not to be cremated.’
Genius is economy. It could not have been more modestly done.
Somewhere or another, very near to where he had stood that
afternoon, a grave was waiting for him. Those few strokes of the pen
had decided that its dimensions should be not eighteen inches by
ten; but five feet four by two.
But the time was not yet: the instruction added to his will need not
begin to take effect for a good many years. Meanwhile his corner of
immortality waited for him, measured by himself to suit his own taste.
It came back to him then as a pleasant simile of fancy, that he had
had an uncle who was an undertaker. It ran in the family. Here was
Mr. Trimblerigg—his own!
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Peace-Work
TO become the spiritual voice of a nation is a rare experience, and in
the history of the race it has come to the individual but seldom. But
when it happens, he is a greater power than military leader, or
politician, or popular preacher, unless in one man all three functions
find themselves combined; then, without much justification in fact, a
people may mistake the combination for the more rare and genuine
article.
It could not exactly be said of Mr. Trimblerigg at this time that he was
a military leader; but the idea had been industriously disseminated,
by his admirers and by himself during the war, that had he been he
would have been a brilliant one. Nor was he exactly a politician; but
he had been very busy and energetic in putting the politicians right,
so that, as they went out of favour in public estimation, he came in.
For the rest, a popular preacher he was, and a very wonderful one;
though it is a curious fact that his sermons and speeches do not read
well in print. Mr. Trimblerigg’s orations were gymnastic exercises and
histrionic performances combined; and these things lose their effect
when reduced to print. Nevertheless he had now become a Voice,
and the sound of him travelled wherever his native tongue was
spoken, war-conditions having given it an atmosphere that it could
fill.
His military instinct he had mainly shown by running about in
moments of crisis and pinning his faith to commanders who up till
then had escaped defeat. When he found he had made a mistake,
he dropped them so quickly that nobody remembered he had ever
believed in them; and having thus discovered three or four and lost
them again, he finally hit upon the right one. Having done that, he did
not allow it to be forgotten, so that the reputation which survived the
final and triumphant catastrophe remained partly his.
His political instinct produced more definite and more solid results;
he persuaded the politicians to do a lot of things which at other times
they would not have dared. Some of these things were not very
scrupulous, and others were not very successful; but they were all
military necessities, and as only the relative truth was told about
them, they took their place in the general scheme of things; and if
they did not exactly do good, they were good for the morale of the
nation for the time being.
And while he thus persuaded the politicians to do things hitherto
impossible for the benefit of the whole nation, he persuaded the Free
Evangelicals also; and in his own time and his own way he secured
for Isabel Sparling and others the desire of their souls which had
been so long denied them. But in that matter, though the thing was
done well and quickly when it was done, he missed something of his
intended effect from the fact that the whole world was then so busy
about war that nothing else seemed much to matter. The sudden
admission of women to the ministry appeared then a mere side-
issue, an emergency measure devised to meet the shortage of men
theologically qualified for the vacant pastorates of congregations
abruptly depleted of their young male element. Thus Mr.
Trimblerigg’s very real achievement in the pulpiteering of women
was regarded, even among the Free Evangelicals, far more as a
war-product than as his own.
Also for Isabel Sparling herself, whom he wished to impress, it had
ceased much to matter. She had become a Second Adventist; and
among the Second Adventists it was admitted that women could
prophesy as well as men. Miss Sparling had gone prophesying to
America; and had caused a great sensation in New York by
prophesying that Brooklyn Bridge had become unsafe, and would fall
if America did not enter the war. She gave a date: and America
saved Brooklyn Bridge to posterity only just in time. After that the
success of Miss Sparling’s American mission was assured; and
whenever the States seemed momentarily to slacken in their
purpose or diminish in their zeal for the rescue of a civilization they
did not understand, Miss Sparling selected some cherished
institution or monument, and began threatening its life; and when,
after due warning a bomb was discovered inside the statue of Liberty
just preparing to go off, she got headlines for Second Adventism
which had never been equalled since Barnum’s landing of Jumbo
(representative of a still older civilization than that which was now
imperilled) some forty years before.
All this is told here merely to indicate what a match to himself Mr.
Trimblerigg had missed by not marrying Isabel Sparling in the days
of his youth. Had they only put their heads together earlier, kingdoms
might have come of which the world has now missed its chance—not
knowing what it has missed; for there can be no doubt that its
spiritual adhesions are not now what they were ten years ago; the
pulpit has sagged a little on its foundations and congregations have
become critical, sceptical even, though they still attend. The doctrine
of Relative Truth has undone more than it intended; and though Mr.
Trimblerigg was not a disappointed man at the moment when war
declared itself over, disappointment was waiting him.
Not at first, as I say. At first, no doubt, as he pulled the wires, he
thought he was plucking from harpstrings of gold, harmonies which
could be heard in Heaven. But his atmosphere affected him; and just
when victory brought him spiritual opportunities such as had never
been his before, he had a sharp attack of the Old Testament, and his
self-righteousness became as the self-righteousness of Moses and
the prophets all rolled into one.
It was then, perceiving that a huge and expectant public was waiting
for him to give the word, that he sent forth the fiery cross bearing
upon it as the battle-cry of peace the double motto ‘Skin the
Scapegoat,’—‘Hew Agag.’
Both sounded well, and both caught on, and for a brief while served
the occasion: but neither made a success of it. The skinning of the
scapegoat lasted for years; but in the process, it became so
denuded by mange that when the skin was finally obtained it proved
worthless. As for Agag he did not come to be hewn at all, walking
delicately; on the contrary he ran and hid himself in a safe place,
where, though the hewers pretended that they meant to get at him,
they knew they could not. And as a consequence Agag remains
unhewn to this day.
And, as a matter of fact, almost from the first, Mr. Trimblerigg, having
given his public what it wanted, knew that it would be so.
He also knew that in high places it was willed that it should not be
otherwise. And here may be recorded the bit of unwritten history
which brought that home to him.
Everybody to whom mediumistic spiritualism makes any appeal has,
in these last days, heard of Sir Roland Skoyle, the great protagonist
of that artful science, by which in equal proportion the sceptics are
confounded, and the credulous are comforted. And that being, up-to-
date, its chief apparent use in the world, it is no wonder that a certain
diplomatist turned to it when he launched his great peace-making
offensive, after the War was over. For diplomacy having to make its
account equally with those who are sceptical of its benefits, and
those who are credulous, it seemed to his alert and adaptable
intelligence that a little spiritualism behind the scenes might give him
the aid and insight that he required.
The direct incentive came from Sir Roland Skoyle himself. He had
secured a wonderful new medium, whose magnetic finger had a
specialized faculty for resting upon certain people of importance—
people who had been of importance, that is to say—in high circles of
diplomacy; and amongst them some who had been largely
instrumental in bringing the world into the condition in which it now
found itself. Among these—the war-makers and peace-makers of the
immediate past—it was natural, war being over, that the latter should
be in special request, where the problem of diplomacy was to
construct a peace satisfactory to that vast body of public opinion
which had ceased to be blood-thirsty on a large scale, but whose
instinct for retributive justice to be dealt out to the wicked by a court
of their accusers had become correspondingly active.
Sir Roland Skoyle, anxious to impress the Prime Minister with the
value of his discovery, had the happy thought of employing Mr.
Trimblerigg as his go-between. And Mr. Trimblerigg having heard a
certain name, august and revered, breathed into his ear, together
with the gist of a recent communication that had come direct, was
not averse from attending a séance in such select and exalted
company. He had an open mind and plenty of curiosity, and the idea
of sharing with the Prime Minister a secret so compromising that no
one else must know of it, strongly attracted him.
And so the sitting was arranged. And there in a darkened room the
four of them sat,—Sir Roland, the medium, Mr. Trimblerigg, and the
Prime Minister.
The medium was small and dark, and middle-aged; she had bright
eyes under a straight fringe and she spoke with a twang. There was
no doubt which side of the water she had come from. Until the
previous year, except for a few days after her birth, her home had
been the United States. The actual place of her birth was important;
it helped to account for her powers; Sir Roland having recently
discovered that the best mediums were people of mixed origin, born
on the high seas. This particular medium, having been born in the
mid-Atlantic, was Irish-American.
The theory of sea-born commerce with the world of spirits I leave to
Sir Roland Skoyle and his fellow experts. My own reason for
referring back to birth and parentage is merely that when the
medium had entered into her trance she no longer spoke that rich
broth of a language formed from two which was natural to her; but
acquired an accent and a mode of delivery entirely different; the
accent having in it a faint touch of the Teutonic, the delivery formal,
well-bred, and courtly; even when the speech was colloquial there
was about it a touch of dignity. And while she so spoke, in a manly
voice, the little woman sat with an air like one enthroned.
The Prime Minister sat jauntily, thumbs in waistcoat, and listened as
one interested and amused, but not as yet convinced. To Mr.
Trimblerigg he said chirpily, ‘If the other side got wind of this, and
used it properly, they could drive me out of office.’
‘That makes it all the more of an adventure,’ replied Mr. Trimblerigg.
‘I should be in trouble too. The Free Evangelical Church has
pronounced against—well, this sort of thing altogether: “Comes of
evil”.’
Sir Roland said, ‘In a year’s time we shall have the whole world
converted.’ But Sir Roland was always saying that. Still, table-turning
and its accompaniments had certainly received a great impetus
since the War; for which reason Mr. Trimblerigg took a friendly view
of it.
The medium’s first remark in her changed manner was sufficiently
startling and to the point:
‘Where is my crown?... Put it on.’
Sir Roland resourcefully picked up a small paper-weight, on which a
brass lion sat regardant, and deposited it precariously on the
medium’s hair.
‘Who’ve you got here? Not Eliza, I hope?’ said the Voice.
Sir Roland, in a tone of marked deference, gave the names of the
company. Two of them were graciously recognized. ‘Mr. Trimblerigg?
We have not had the pleasure of meeting him before. How do you
do, Mr. Trimblerigg?’
Mr. Trimblerigg, at a gesture from Sir Roland, bowed over the hand
the medium had graciously extended.
‘Do I kiss it?’ he inquired, doubtful of the etiquette.
Sir Roland discreetly shook his head. The ceremony was over.
There was a pause. Then: ‘Faites vos jeux, Messieurs!’ said the
Voice.
This was unexpected to all; and to one cryptic.
‘What does that mean?’ inquired Mr. Trimblerigg, in whose Free
Church training French had not been included.
The Prime Minister rose lightly to the occasion. ‘It means, or it
practically means, ‘Make your Peace, Gentlemen.’ Then, to the
unseen Presence: ‘The game is over sir,—well over. Now we have
only to collect the winnings.’
This statement of the facts was apparently not accepted: the game
was to go on. ‘Couleur gagne!’ went the Voice; and then again,
‘Faites vos jeux, Messieurs.’
‘Our present game,’ respectfully insisted the Prime Minister, ‘is to
make peace. To you, therefore, Sir, we come, as an authority—in this
matter of peace-making a very special authority. We as victors are
responsible; and we have to find a solution. The peace will not be
negotiated, it will be dictated. The question is on what terms; under
what sanctions; with what penalties? Under a Democracy such as
ours—’
‘Don’t talk nonsense,’ came the Voice, ‘Democracy does not exist.
Invite public opinion; say you agree; then ignore it, and do as you
think best. Sanctions? You will not get good work from a man while
the rope is round his neck; he wastes time and brain thinking how
soon he will die. Penalties? Yes: if you think you can get hold of the
really responsible ones.’
‘We think we can,’ purred the Prime Minister.
‘Dig up the dead, eh? That was the mediæval notion. You tar and
feather their corpses, and you hang them in chains: most indecent,
and no good to anybody. One of them is here now,—“The Man in the
Iron Mask” as we call him,—a much improved character, his world-
politics a failure, they no longer interest him; he plays on the French
horn,—badly, but it amuses him; when he strikes a false note he
calls it the Double Entente. He means that for a joke. He says they
may dig him up and hang him in chains of iron, or brass, or glass-
lustre, or daisies, or anything else if it amuses them. But you are not
proposing to hang anybody, are you?’
Mr. Trimblerigg, voicing his notion in the scriptural phraseology which
had prompted it, explained that skinning for the one, and hewing, not
hanging, for the other was the process proposed.
‘Who is your man?’ the Voice inquired sharply.
Agag was indicated.
Came a dead pause; then, very emphatically, ‘I won’t have him here!’
said the Voice.
Here? His auditors looked at each other in consternation.
What on earth, or above earth, or under earth, did ‘here’ mean?
The Prime Minister and Mr. Trimblerigg had both by now become
convinced that they were in the actual Presence that had been
promised them. But they could not admit to the world, or even to
themselves, that there was a possibility of Agag going to the place
where the Presence was supposed to be; or of the Presence being
in the place where Agag was supposed to be going. They sat like
cornered conspirators.
‘I won’t have it!’ said the Voice, almost violently. ‘We are not on
speaking terms. He and I do not get on together. Send him to Eliza:
she’ll manage him!’
This was more awful still. The Presence and ‘Eliza’, it seemed, were
not in that happy reunion which for Christian families is the expected
thing. Yet as to where Eliza had gone no reasonable doubt was
possible.
‘On ne va plus!’ cried the Voice, and the séance fell into sudden
confusion. ‘I won’t have it! I won’t have it!’ shrieked the medium
coming to, and casting off her crown at the feet of Mr. Trimblerigg.
And the words, beginning in a deep German guttural, ended in Irish-
American.
And that, if the world really wants to know, is why no real attempt
was made to hew or hang Agag, or do anything to him except on
paper in diplomatic notes which meant nothing, and at a General
Election which meant very little more—only that the Prime Minister
and Mr. Trimblerigg were saving their faces and winning temporary,
quite temporary, popularity, which eventually did them as little good
as it did harm to Agag.
The skinning of the scapegoat was not so expeditiously disposed of.
In that case the goat suffered considerably; but the skin was never
really worth the pains it took to remove from his dried and broken
bones.
When will modern civilization really understand that its predilection
for the Old Testament, once a habit, has now become a disease; and
that if it is not very careful the world will die of it.
‘Faites vos jeux, Messieurs!’ Play your game! Sometimes you may
win, and sometimes you may lose; but a day comes when you win
too big a stake for payment to be possible. Then the bank breaks,
and where are you?
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Circumstances alter Cases
HAD the rescue of the native tribes of Puto-Congo from the
squeezing embrace of modern industrialism and its absentee
shareholders been a fairy-tale, they would have remained a happy
people without a history, and here at least no more would have been
heard of them. But this being the real story, things went otherwise.
It is true that Native Industries Limited not only became itself a
reformed character, but managed, by its control of the river routes
and depots, to impose repentance on the great Puto-Congo
Combine also. There, too, a rout was made of the old Board of
Directors, and the missionary zeal of Free Evangelicalism, with an
admixture of True Belief, held the balance of power. In the first year
shares went down at a run from a thirty to a ten per cent dividend,
and the mortality of indentured labour was reduced in about the
same proportion.
Of course the shareholders grumbled—not at the reduced death-rate
in itself, but at the awkward parallel which its proportional fall
suggested between toll of life and that other toll of a more
marketable kind which mainly concerned them. It was not pleasant to
feel that a reduced ten per cent profit was always going to be the
condition of a reduced ten per cent death-rate: that fifteen per cent of
the one would cause fifteen per cent of the other, and that, by
implication, a life-saving of five per cent might be effected if the
chastened shareholders would stay languidly content with a five per
cent profit. Mr. Trimblerigg himself felt this to be a reflection upon the
reformation he had effected. He had practically promised the
shareholders that decent treatment of the natives would eventually
bring larger profits. He was annoyed that it had not done so, and was
already taking steps to secure more co-ordination and efficiency in
the combined companies when the war supervened and gave to the
relations of the brother races, white and black, a different
complexion.
To put it quite plainly, under war-conditions so far-reaching as to
affect the whole world, humanitarian principles had to take second
place. For the white race, or tribe, or group of tribes in which Mr.
Trimblerigg found himself embraced by birth and moral training was
now saving the world not only for private enterprise and democracy,
but for the black and the brown and the yellow races as well, all
round the globe and back again from San Francisco to Valparaiso.
And so the enlistment of the black races in the cause of freedom—
even with a little compulsion—became an absolute necessity, a
spiritual as well as a military one, and unfortunately the blacks—and
more especially the blacks of Puto-Congo—did not see it in that light
of an evangelizing civilization as the whites did. They did not know
what freedom really was: how could they, having no politics? Their
idea of freedom was to run about naked, to live rent-free in huts of
their own building on land that belonged to nobody, to put in two
hours’ work a week instead of ten hours a day, and when an enemy
was so craven as to let himself be captured alive to plant him head-
downwards in the earth from which he ought never to have come.
That was their view of freedom, and I could name sections of
civilized communities holding very similar views though with a
difference.
Slavery, on the other hand, was having to wear anything except
beads, and nose-rings, and imitation silk-hats made of oilskin, having
to work regularly to order for a fixed wage, and to pay a hut-tax for
the upkeep of a machine-like system of government, for which they
had no wish and in which they saw no sense. And that being so, it
really did not matter whether the power which imposed these
regulations was benevolent in its intentions or merely rapacious,
whether it secured them by blood, or blockade, or by bribing the
tribal chiefs (which was the Free Evangelical method) to get the thing
done in native ways of their own. They did not like it.
Puto-Congo, having sampled it for twenty years, had definitely
decided that civilization was bad for it; and when, under the
evangelizing zeal of Mr. Trimblerigg and his co-religionists,
civilization modified its methods, they beat their drums for joy and
believing that civilization was at last letting them go, ran off into the
woods to play. And though, here and there, their chiefs hauled them
back again and made them do brief spells of work at certain seasons
of the year, they regarded it rather as a cleaning-up process,
preparatory to leave-taking, than as a carrying on of the old system
under a new form; and so they continued to play in the woods and
revert to happy savagery, and especially to that complete nudity of
both sexes which the missionaries so strongly disapproved.
It was that holiday feeling, coming after the bad time they had been
through under the old system—a holiday feeling which even the
chiefs, stimulated by bribes, could not control—which did the
mischief; for it came inopportunely just at the time when, five
thousand miles away, civilization had become imperilled by causes
with which the Puto-Congo natives had nothing whatever to do. If
civilization was so imperilled all the better for them.
It was all very unfortunate: for while the fact that civilization was at
war did not make civilization more valuable to the natives of Puto-
Congo, it did make the natives and their trade-produce very much
more valuable to civilization. Quite half-a-dozen things which they
had unwillingly produced under forced labour in the past—rubber
was one—had now become military necessities. It was no longer a
mere question of profits for shareholders—civilization itself was at
stake. Production had suddenly to be brought back to the thirty per
cent standard; and that holiday feeling, so natural but so untimely in
its incidence, was badly in the way. And so powers were given
(which are not usually given to commercial concerns—though
sometimes taken) and under government authority—a good deal at
the instigation of Mr. Trimblerigg—the Puto-Congo Combine became
exalted and enlarged into the Imperial Chartered Ray River Territory
Company, which was in fact a provisional government with powers of
enlistment civil and military, of life and death, and the making and
administration of whatever laws might be deemed necessary in an
emergency.
Endowed with these high powers, the Directors at home, with every
intention to use them circumspectly and in moderation, instructed
their commissioners accordingly. But when the commissioners got to
work they found, in the face of ‘that holiday feeling,’ that moderation
did not deliver the goods. And since the goods had to be delivered,
lest the world should be lost to democracy, they took advantage of
the censorship which had been established against the promulgation
of news unfavourable to the moral character of their own side, and
took the necessary and effective means to deliver them. And when
the profits once more began to rise, these did not go to the
shareholders but to the Government as a form of war-tribute, and
that, of course, made it morally all right—for the ten per cent
shareholders at any rate—since they knew nothing about it.
And thus, for three or four years, Puto-Congo natives did their bit,
losing their own lives at an ever-increasing death-rate, and saving
democracy which they did not understand, for that other side of the
world which they did not know. They got no war-medals for it and no
promotion; nor were any reports of those particular casualties printed
in the papers. Enough that the holiday feeling went off, and the
goods were delivered. Over the rest, war-conditions and war-
legislation drew a veil, and nothing was said.
And that is why, while war went on, Mr. Trimblerigg and the rest of
the world did not hear of it; or if they heard anything, did not believe
what they heard; for that too is one of the conditions that war
imposes. Truth, then, becomes more relative than ever; which is one
of the reasons why Mr. Trimblerigg was then in his element. But
when the war was sufficiently over for intercommunication to re-
establish itself, and when the skinning of the scapegoat had become
a stale game, and when the hewing of Agag had emphatically not
come off, then Mr. Trimblerigg, and others, began to hear of it. It was
the others that mattered. Mr. Trimblerigg—his war-mind still upon
him, and still suffering from his severe attack of Old Testament—did
not believe it; but the others did, and the others were mainly the
most active and humanitarian section of the Free Evangelicals.
Having already expressed their disapproval of skinning the
scapegoat and hewing Agag, even to the extent of pronouncing
against it at their first annual conference after the war, they now
fastened on the recrudescence of ugly rumours from Puto-Congo
and the adjacent territories, and began to hold Mr. Trimblerigg
responsible.
They had at least this much reason upon their side, that Mr.
Trimblerigg was still chairman of the Directors of Native Industries
Limited, and, by right of office, sat upon the administrative council of
the Chartered Company. And when, as the leakage of news became
larger, it seemed that everything he had formerly denounced as an
organized atrocity was being, or had but recently been done on a
much larger scale by his own commissioners, the cry became
uncomfortably loud, and the war-mind, which can manipulate facts to
suit its case while they are suppressed by law, began to find itself in
difficulties.
Mr. Trimblerigg, faced by certified facts which he continued to deny
or question, began jumping from the New to the Old Testament and
back again with an agility which confused his traducers but did not
convince them; and the allegiance of the Free Evangelicals became
sharply divided. The reunion of the Free Churches for which Mr.
Trimblerigg had so long been working, already adversely affected by
the divergencies of the war, was now strained to breaking.
On the top of this came the news that the natives of Puto-Congo had
risen in revolt and had begun massacring the missionaries, and Free
Evangelical opinion became more sharply divided than ever—
whether to withdraw the missions and cease to have any further
connection with the Chartered Company, or to send out
reinforcements, less spiritual and more military, adopt the policy of
the firm hand, and restore not liberty but order.
Mr. Trimblerigg then announced that he would do both. To the
Administrative Council he adumbrated a scheme for the gradual
development of the Chartered Company, with its dictatorial powers,
into the Puto-Congo Free State Limited, with a supervised self-
government of its own, mainly native but owing allegiance to the
Company on which its commercial prosperity and development
would still have to depend.
Matters were at a crisis, and were rapidly getting worse. Mr.
Trimblerigg had made too great a reputation over Puto-Congo affairs