the dependency viewed even from the strictly utilitarian standpoint. And for these reasons. An African resembles other human beings. If he is working and producing for himself, he will work better and produce more than if he is working for someone else. That is elemental.
Again, the purchasing capacity of an African or arboricultural community growing or gathering and preparing crops for export, is necessarily far greater than the purchasing capacity of an agglomeration of African wage earners. In the former case the equivalent earned represents the value of the crop plus the labour devoted to its production. In the latter case the equivalent merely represents labour, the intrinsic value of the product remaining the property of the white employer. Now the white employer of African labour in a tropical African dependency does not spend his profits in that dependency, but outside it. The native agriculturist, on the other hand, spends his profits in a way which cannot but benefit the revenues of the dependency, because he spends them on the purchase of European merchandise, and that European merchandise pays customs' dues upon entering the dependency. The desire to acquire the products of the outer world is the stimulus which induces the African to grow crops for export. He is not driven to do so from economic necessity.
I fully realise, of course, that neither the argument adduced above, nor any other arguments of a like kind, meet the objections of those who contend that a tropical African dependency should be regarded as a milch cow for the direct enrichment of the protecting European State, or for that of a few individual capitalists within that State. I quite recognise the force and logic of that point of view, but I maintain that it ought not to be allowed to exercise a determining influence upon European Governments responsible for the administration of tropical African territory. I oppose these views to the utmost of my power, and have done so consistently for a quarter of a century. I oppose them because I look upon those who entertain them as representing an element which makes for degradation in human affairs. The just, equitable, understanding government of the primitive, but highly intelligent, adaptable, kindly and politically helpless races of tropical Africa, is one of the
