THE GOVERNMENT OF TROPICAL COLONIES.

W. ALLEYNE IRELAND, ESQ., London, England.

It is a curious instance of the mutability of human affairs that three years ago the United States should have practically threatened war against England on account of an alleged attempt on the part of the latter to extend the boundaries of one of her colonies and that to-day the United States should be taking heart of grace in her colonial ventures from England's colonial successes. I mention this merely to show how entirely foreign to the American mind was any idea of territorial expansion a couple of years ago. Perhaps there could be named no subject on which the people at large in this country possess so little information as the gov. ernment of dependencies; nothing could be more natural. It could never have been contemplated that the government of dependencies would ever be a problem which the people of the United States would be called on to face. Since it became evident that the Philippine Islands and Porto Rico would have to be governed by American administration a vast amount of rubbish has appeared in the newspapers of the country in reference to the nature of the problem thus suddenly arising out of the success of American arms. Articles have appeared in even the more respectable journals in reference to the colonial system of England which contained inaccuracies which would be severely punished in an English schoolboy of fourteen years of age. It has become common to refer to England's colonial empire as though it consisted of a number of homogeneous parts which in the main present to the sovereign state problems of a similar nature. Nothing could be farther from the facts, and I am inclined to think that before any good work can be done in the direction of educating public sentiment in regard to the government of Porto Rico and the Philippines the fact must be clearly established that the government of tropical dependencies is a very different question from the government of states or dependencies outside the tropics. In a tropical climate the conditions of life are so different from any that can be found in northern countries that the experience of home government forms a poor guide for colonial adminis

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tration. In Europe and in North America the task of government is made comparatively easy from the fact that the general tendency of the majority of the people is in the direction of progress, industry, social improvement, morality and good order; and every act of the government which does not injuriously affect any of these factors meets with the approval and active support of the masses. In tropical climates, on the other hand, the aims of the government find but little encouragement amongst the masses. population contains but a small element of that material which is necessary for progressive development, and color prejudice forms an insuperable barrier to the social advancement of that small minority of the colored race which succeeds in attaining positions of honorable independence. By far the greater number of individuals in tropical countries are without any ambition to do more than secure the necessities of life, and the ease with which this ambition is satisfied contributes in no small degree to the idleness and indifference which is the marked characteristic of the population. A short residence in a tropical colony serves to convince most persons of the governing class of the utter hopelessness of effecting any material change in the natural disposition of the natives, and whether such conviction is based on insufficient grounds or not, the result is the same, and each successive generation of reformers faces the situation with an amazing confidence for a while and then wraps itself up in a garment of indifference, stifling any inconvenient pricks of conscience with the assurance that the time is not yet ripe for the wholesale regeneration of humanity. Thus it happens that the new governor, the new colonial secretary, the new administrator, be he never so bemedaled for worthiness in past service at home, sends to his government the same discouraging tale of a people possessing indeed some virtues of the lesser kind, but lost to all desire for progress and content to live a life in which no disturbing thought of rising above the common level intrudes on the soothing monotony of existence. No one who has spent any considerable time in the tropics can have failed to observe that where any degree of prosperity has been reached, where any approach to sanitary conditions exists, where, in fact, any indication of progress is in evidence, these things have been achieved not by means of but in spite of the mass of the people. That in some parts of

the tropics this may be due in some degree to the evil effects of slavery constitutes a satisfactory excuse for those conditions, the existence of which is not in any way affected by a consideration of their origin. When measured by the commercial standard the difference between tropical and nontropical colonies becomes most strikingly apparent. Thus taking England's tropical and non-tropical colonies I find that during the past five years the non-tropical colonies, Australia, Canada and Newfoundland, imported British produce to the value of $15.34 per head of their population, whilst the tropical colonies imported British goods to the value of only fifty-six cents per head. Again, the nontropical colonies exported to England produce to the value of $22.88 per head and the tropical colonies produce to the value of sixty cents a head. During the past twelve years I have spent most of my time in the British colonies. I was for seven years in the West Indies and visited India and several of the French and Dutch tropical colonies. My observations during the past twelve years have led me to form opinions in regard to the tropics which are likely to be very unpopular in this country. I claim no authority for my opinions. If the conclusions at which I have arrived are wrong I can only say that they are the outcome of careful and unprejudiced investigation. I may say then that I do not believe that the inhabitants of the tropics will ever be capable of self-government in the sense which is usually attached to that expression. Is there at the present day to be found anywhere in the tropics a country which is showing itself capable of self-government? I might go farther and ask has there ever been any country in the tropics which has shown itself capable of self-government? It is true that in Peru at the time of the Incas there was a government which maintained discipline and order amongst the people of that country, but the government was autocratic and did not lay with the people, and excellent as the results of the system were in many respects, they have been very generally condemned by writers because they did not proceed from self-government, but from a perfect form of despotism. Now if we glance at India as it is to-day we see a spectacle of three hundred million people governed by thirty thousand British officials. There has been a great clamor in favor of India for the Indians. It is claimed and with great justice that the Hindoos, who have been educated according

to western notions, have shown themselves capable of entering all the professions with the greatest credit to themselves in their examinations. I am free to admit that I have never met amongst other races men who have shown such an exquisite subtlety of intellect, such an extraordinary aptitude for learning, as some Hindoos whom I have known, but unfortunately subtlety of intellect does not help people toward self-government. It is a very common error to suppose that administrative capacity goes hand in hand with intellectual attainment. You may take a native official in India and as long as things run smoothly he will amaze you by the cleverness and ingenuity of his annual report; compared with it the unvarnished statements of his English brother official will appear as the crude production of a schoolboy. But send a flood, send a famine, devastate his territory with disease and what do you find, an absolute incapacity for action. Then it is that the administrative ability of the Englishman steps in and saves the country from disaster. What is wanted in the government of colonies is extreme energy and determination and these qualities are not found in the make-up of the oriental races. If we turn now to the negro in the tropics we find a still worse condition of affairs. In the British West Indies, where the negro is treated better than in any other part of the world, we find the negro voters sending negroes into the legislative assemblies-in some of these colonies the negro or colored men outnumber the white persons. For more than a year I attended all the meetings of the legislative assembly in such a colony. I listened hour upon hour to the speeches of these negro legislators. I found many of them excellent speakers and keen debaters, but I found also that they were entirely unfit for legislative duties. They seemed to be possessed of no sense of proportion, no sense of responsibility; they were apparently governed almost entirely by their emotions. It would appear as though the British colonial office held similar views to those which I have expressed, for within the past year two islands, Dominica and Tobago, have been deprived of their representative institutions; the former has been converted into a crown colony and the latter has been made a ward of Trinidad. Those who are best informed in the West Indies tell me that it is contemplated to make considerable changes in the near future in the government of the British West Indian colonies. Now it is often urged that the reason why the

negro in the tropics has not shown himself capable of selfgovernment is because he has not had time. If we take the case of the chief negro republic, Hayti, it would certainly appear that they have not had time, for it is beyond doubt a fact that cannibalism prevails to a considerable extent in the republic. Sir Spencer St. John in his book on Hayti, published in 1884, places the matter altogether beyond question and during a visit I paid to the island in 1893 I saw sufficient to convince me that the abominable practice still existed, but, as a matter of fact, the negroes have had just as much time to develop a civilization and to evolve a satisfactory form of government as the white man. There were negroes in Africa when Cæsar landed on British soil and since that time the people of Britain have made themselves what they are to-day whilst the negro in Africa remains substantially what he was. The reason why the negro has made no progress is that a tropical climate does not place a man under any necessity to exert himself, and there is no reason to suppose that the climatic influence of the tropics will be less powerful in the next thousand years than it has been in the past thousand years. I am inclined to think that so long as theorists will maintain that political and ethical principles have an universal applicability, so long will all attempts at civilizing the tropics end in grievous disappointment. I will not go so far as to say that the faculty of governing the tropics lies wholly with the Anglo-Saxon race but I am firmly of the opinion that without the strong hand of the man of the north to hold things together the tropics will never advance beyond the point which has been reached by the central American republics. James Anthony Froude has, to my mind, expressed the whole question of the government of tropical dependencies in the following lines, taken from his "English in the West Indies": "The leading of the wise few, the willing obedience of the many, is the beginning and end of all right action. Secure this, and you secure everything. Fail to secure it, and, be your liberties as wide as you can make them, no success is possible.