to produce, by the consciousness that he will obtain the equivalent not only for his labour, but for the value of the article his labour has produced. It requires that the industrial classes of Europe shall find in tropical Africa an ever-widening market for the absorption of their output. This cannot be if African labour is exhausted and impoverished, because—if for no other reason—African purchasing capacity in the goods of Europe is thereby diminished. Other consequences are numerous and obvious: but that one is immediate.
Now consider the picture of a tropical African dependency—take British East Africa as typical—where policy is directed to ensuring that a dozen or so European concessionaires shall earn large dividends. The first call upon the labour of the country is for work on the plantations and estates of these concessionaires. As a result native villages decay. The population is unable to feed itself. The Administration has to import foodstuffs at great expense. The people sink immeasurably in the scale of their self-respect. They are reduced to a proletariat with no rights. There is no horizon before them: no honourable ambition to fulfil. Their capacities are arrested. Their condition becomes one of stagnancy. Add to this all the abuses incidental to labour thus economically forced, with their attendant discontents developing into sporadic outbreaks; the notorious inefficiency of African labour under such circumstances; the decrease in vitality consequent upon the introduction of an unnatural existence; the lowered birth rate ; the increase in prostitution and venereal disease. Here is no constructive policy, but a destructive one. Nothing is being built up, except the ephemeral fortunes of a few white men. The future, viewed from the broad standpoint of both European and African interests, is being undermined all the time.
The folly of the conception is palpable. If it be true in an economic sense, as true it is, that the "asset" of a tropical African dependency is primarily, the native; a system which enfeebles and impoverishes the native is suicidal, always from the same utilitarian point of view. That is one side of the case. The other side is that in enfeebling and impoverishing the African, you are destroying the major economic interest of Europe in the African. Every penny taken from the national wealth of
