Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 698
Now in a broad and general way these white races cannot live in the tropics, not as a race. They can live, individually, and go home to die, but that is different — a poor life at the best, and no real basis for national life. This is of course only a general statement. In certain portions of the earth the distribution of winds and rain and sea currents, an insular situation and above all a high altitude may offset a tropical situation. Consider the case of Ecuador, situated, just as it ought to be, on the Equator, or that of Peru, and the uplands of Mexico.
In the British Empire there is no doubt that the vast area of India, which along with Burma and the Malay States covers, in all 2,023,642 square miles, is no fit habitation for white people. Here live 362,000,000 tropical coloured subjects of the King. British Tropical Africa between Egypt and the Transvaal includes 2,333,300 square miles. At the present time the white population only numbers 114,000 in a total of 49,313,000 inhabitants. Great areas, such as Nigeria and other West African and equatorial possessions, along with most of East Africa and the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan must be counted out of the white Empire. The Kenya-Tanganyika upland with a high altitude and cool open country may prove white; it is too early to judge. The Rhodesias have already a white population of 69,000, but carry a native working — and non-working — class of 2,680,000. The West Indies (whites about 123,000, coloured 2,183,000) are not a habitation where the white races can flourish, still less the Central and South American mainland possessions. British Guiana, ‘almost on the Equator,’ with an area of 89,480 square miles, has some 13,000 whites with 337,000 negroes and East Indians; British Honduras has an area of only 8,398 square miles with a white population of one in twenty-five.
Now no one can believe that the future of the British Empire rests on its possession and development of its tropical dependencies. The course of civilization moves northward. Everything turns on the development of the Temperate Zones. And the Temperate Zones themselves move northward as the progress of invention makes work possible, and life comfortable, where once was death. Nor are the Temperate Zones in reality limited to the rigid boundary marked by the parallels of the Arctic Circle. As with the tropical regions there is more than mere latitude to take into account. The prevailing ocean currents temper the climate of the western faces of the continents of the Northern Hemisphere. The effect of the Gulf Stream reaches even to Spitzbergen (between 74° and 81° latitude, north). Hence the lines that mark the levels of summer and winter cold and the lines of rainfall and moisture, show a very different climate picture from the astronomical zones. And here the British Empire in the Northern Hemisphere is fortunate indeed. It largely escapes the great area of desert, that encircles the earth and waits in vain for the rainfall that the set of the ocean winds denies to it. The belt of desert runs typically where the temperate and Tropical Zones meet. In Asia the folds of the mountain ranges throw it higher up; the desert of Gobi in northern China occupies 300,000 square miles. The same belt appears in British India as the Thar desert. A huge part of inland Arabia, one third is blotted with the desolation of Roba El Khali, the ‘empty place’; a belt of desolation crosses Africa from the Red Sea almost to the shores of the Atlantic (latitude 2 2° north), broken only by the little strip of the green valley of the Nile to show what might be. In America the desert reappears in the southwest of the United States where the ‘desert on the march’ now meets irrigation on the run.
In the Northern Hemisphere this relative absence of desert in the British Empire is added to the happy effect on the climate of winds and ocean currents. The great current moving eastward across the northern Pacific, the Kuro Shiwo Drift, makes British Colombia fertile and temperate up to 60° north latitude, and the warmth and moisture carried east over the Rockies by the Chinook winds renders the whole Mackenzie River Valley habitable and productive to the Arctic circle.
In the Southern Hemisphere the British Empire is not so fortunate. The desert is there reproduced ‘between wind and water’ as the dead heart of Australia and the Kalahari desert of Bechuanaland. We may take it that the Temperate Zones of the Empire in the true sense of suitability for the life and progress of the white races, must leave out the whole of India, Burma and the Malayan possessions; must leave out, but with a lingering backward look, the part of Australia north of the Tropic of Capricorn, and with it, till science advances further, the dead heart of the Australian continent. We may disqualify as too hot all Africa north of the Rhodesias, with a suspended judgment over Tanganyika; and we may leave out as too cold all of Canada north of the parallel of 6o° which marks the northern boundary of the western provinces, except a sort of river corridor from the Great Bear Lake down the Mackenzie to the Arctic. In a sense we must leave out, in the east half of Canada, the most northerly part of Quebec province and of Labrador, this last at present an appendage of Newfoundland. These regions are not truly habitable, but if people presently insist on living there, it’s hard to deny their presence. With metals enough, pulpwood enough and water power enough, people will live in the dark with 50° below zero outside. We can abolish cold. Heat we can temper a little, indoors, but not abolish. There is no way to ‘air-condition’ Trinidad and British Guiana. The white Empire knows nothing of Central America, nor of the South American mainland.
In detail, then, this is what we see of Greater Britain for British people to occupy. In Canada there is an area of about 2,500,000 square miles of land fit for occupation with a present population of just over 11,000,000. Newfoundland without Labrador has 42,000 square miles and 288,000 people. For the Union of South Africa and the Rhodesias we may assign an area of 900,000 square miles, with a European population of 2,000,000. Temperate Australia, capable of white settlement, as far as climate goes, and capable of irrigation where now desert, is very difficult to estimate, but a reasonable conjecture may put it at 2,000,000 square miles. It now contains less than 7,000,000 white people, along with some 50,000 aborigines who live mostly in the ‘never never’ country and count for nothing in political destiny. New Zealand, the most typically temperate and the most typically British of all the overseas territory, has an area of 103,000 square miles, all of it fit for occupation, as far as that can be said of any country. The population of 1,601,000 inhabitants contains only 86,000 native Maoris. They add a touch of colour and of history but are not a factor in development at large.
In such a picture the thing that ‘leaps to the eye’ is the relative emptiness of the British Empire — some 22,000,000 of people thinly spread over an area of nearly 6,000,000 square miles. This means less than four people to a square mile. Here are races the same or close in blood. Here is one common language even if varied with smaller patches of bilingualism — the abiding French of French Canada, the wilful Gaelic resurrected in Ireland, and the uncertain Dutch of South Africa. Here is a common history, part of it of ‘battles long ago’ that leave nothing but a twin glory as of the Plains of Abraham, part of it of conflicts still smouldering out as volcanic ashes slowly turn to rock. Majuba and the Tugela will some day sound to South African ears as Louisburg and Quebec do to us in Canada. This is the real Empire, so relatively empty in the midst of its vast resources that economically it is just beginning.
The statistics quoted above show, indeed, that in this outer Empire there live less than some four people to a square mile. The statistics as usual falsify the case. The Empire is even emptier than that. In modern machine civilization, population, even in new countries crowds into industrial centres. Semi-agricultural occupations move into the city. The pig lives on the land but dies in the city, as a dressed hog. The farm raises food, but the city cans preserve, distributes, advertises and sells it. Modem transport rushes commuters in and out of city suburbs in a daily tide, ebbing in the evening. Modem skyscrapers swallow them by day. Hence agricultural Argentina, with only 12,761,000 inhabitants in all, crowds 3,500,000 into Buenos Aires and its suburbs. Uraguay, a cattle republic, of 2,687,000 — has three-quarters of a million people in Montevideo. Reckoning similarly if we cut out the great city centres of the Dominions — Sydney with 1,267,000 inhabitants, Melbourne with 1,018,000, Greater Montreal with 1,000,000 inhabitants and if we add to these three cities the population (3,640,000) living in the fourteen overseas British cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants each, we get a grand total of the dwellers in the greater cities of nearly 7,000,000. There are therefore outside of these cities only 2 1/2 people to the square mile.
Connect with the realization of this emptiness the consideration of the enormous natural resources contained in the Empire. Remember further that the advance of mankind is now towards such temperate regions. The days of ivory and pepper and spices, of Nubian slaves and Indian muslins, have given place to the days of iron and steel and nickel, of grain and coal and oil and the hydraulic power of rivers fed from the northern snow. Of the primary world products rubber alone — a newcomer — lingers in the tropical forest. But its days there are numbered. Shifting already from the forest to the plantation sooner or later the advance of chemistry will send it the way of the guano bird and the silkworm. Nature is too slow for northern energy.
This leads, then, to the discussion of the wealth and the resources of the British Empire.
SOME BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
Oxford Survey of the British Empire. 6 vols. (1925) LUCAS, SIR c p. Partition and Colonization of Africa. (1922) MACINNES, c. M. The British Commonwealth and its Unsolved Problems (1925)
CROMER (EARL). Modem Egypt (1916)
KING-HALL, S. Western Civilization and the Far East (1927)
ZIMMERN, A. The Third British Empire (1926)
CHAPTER III
The Wealth and Resources of the Empire
What is Wealth? — Prices in Money do not Measure Wealth — Physical Goods, Land and Natural Resources — The Trade of Past — Epochs — Spices, Sugar, Ivory, Slaves — Trade of Today; Oil, Wheat, Rubber, Asbestos, Manganese — The World’s Supply of Food — Wheat and the Wheat Problem — Coal, Minerals and Metals — Eldorado and Aladdin’s Cave — Water Power — Vast Possibilities of Expansion
WEALTH’ means various things. St. Paul voiced the cheerful sentiment that each man ought to seek every other man’s wealth. It sounds good business; but he only meant ‘well being.’ The rubric of the Church of England speaks of the ‘days of our wealth,’ as contrasted with the ‘hour of our tribulation’ — this last term meaning the threshing out of grain with a flail. Our words often carry thus a forgotten depth of significance, lost in their superficial use by long generations. Few have fared worse than ‘wealth,’ a moral term shifted to material things and thence to mere calculation in figures. The beginning of economic wisdom is found in restoring the idea of wealth to an earlier meaning, but moral not, at least, material. No true idea of economic wealth can be got from figures of money. Computations of bank credits, foreign investments, shares, debentures and government bonds, returns of income and public revenue — these things are not the substance of wealth but the shadow of it. They are certificates of a claim to wealth, or a contract about wealth or its disposal. They are like the flickering shadows on a fire-lit wall, as easily distorted as the moving shapes of Plato’s famous cave.
The realization of these truths is the first thing needed for clear economic vision, and in this respect most people are still blind or see only through a banker’s spectacles. In the great stock exchange crash of 1929 it was said that $100,000,000 of wealth disappeared in an hour. At least the banker thought it did. The farmer never saw it go. To take a very simple example — a farm is wealth. If the owner gives a mortgage on it the wealth is still there, undiminished. The mortgage is just a statement about it. Or take a large example: if the United Kingdom has a national debt of £10,000,000,000 and the debt is all ‘held,’ as it is called, by people in and of the United Kingdom, then, the nation as a total is no richer and no poorer thereby. One man’s debt is another man’s asset. The ‘debt,’ reduced to a proposition in words, means that a certain number of the people (ever so many thousands of them), have received promises from all the people collectively, including themselves, to give them some day £10,000,000,000 worth of work and services and goods, and meantime to give the advances on it called interest. If the debt were cancelled, the people with no government bonds would gain, the people with them would lose. Broadly speaking, the poor are better off by paying less taxes and the rich worse off by getting no interest. The result as book-keeping would cancel out. This is what happened when inflation exploded the old debts of Germany and Czarist Russia into nebulous gas. The wealth of the nation physically was undisturbed. Morally, the shock to confidence might knock off the edge of national willingness to work; just as a successful theft undermines both the character of the burglar and the confidence of a house-holder. Although it leaves the two together just as rich as before, the danger is that the householder may turn thief.
It is well to emphasize this distinction of physical values from money values and indeed to harp on it. The tune needs harping. Much of British and even of American policy has turned for its full interpretation on this simple point. When England in bygone decades ‘invested’ huge sums in South America to build railways, street railways, electric plants and frozen meat appurtenances, the ‘wealth’ created was in Argentina and Uruguay, not in England. Of the 26,000 miles of railway in Argentina, 16,800 are owned by British investors; and in Uruguay 1,5-00 out of 1,700 miles. South America has the wealth, England only the promise of disposable wealth, still to come. If English ‘money,’ meaning in reality English labour, services and foods, drilled oil wells and laid oil pipes in Mexico, it is Mexico that has the wealth. What England gets remains to be seen. If the United States, that is, certain of its citizens, have put ‘money’ into Canada (estimated now at a total of about $4,000,000,000) the physical results accrue to Canada not to the United States. In all such cases what the investor has is a promise. The Mexicans had the oil and the English had a promise to get some of it. When we say how rich is England — nearly four billion pounds sterling of foreign investment. The man from Mars, looking down on us, is unable to see it. He says how rich are the Argentines, and the Mexicans; and how rich the Canadians are going to be.
In times not very long ago this distinction made little difference. Foreign investments looked as good as property held at home, perhaps even better. They were backed up with vastly superior physical power. If interest failed, customs duties could be collected by force, or goods seized, out of foreign ports. Universal gold money converted all things to a common currency. Bond holders leaned back against their government. Adventurous investors were protected in their property, physically and morally, by an advance guard of ‘civilized’ power in the dark places of the earth. When Europe opened up East Africa, the first vessel on Lake Tanganyika was a missionary launch fittingly named from the New Testament. But the second was a gun-boat.
Those days are past. At present the uncertainties of war and peace, rebellion and revolution, the opportunities for repudiation, the lack of a universal mechanism of payment, make the situation of a bond-holding creditor of a foreign government or enterprise, far other than what it was. Even on the moral side the issue is not absolutely clear except to those for whom property is property, and a contract a contract and with that an end of it. This view, clear as day to Lord Chancellor Eldon a hundred years ago, is dissolving now. Promises overgreat, made under duress, altered by circumstance, broken away from equity, will never hold when physical force is lacking. The bearing of this on the development of Empire resources with Empire investment, is obvious.
Estimates of total national wealth, as presented in statistical year books and books of reference, are always computed and stated in terms of money values. Of necessity the very magnitude of the calculation leaves room for error great in proportion. Such estimates are worked out in various ways. Income tax returns can be turned back into figures of capital; the returns of inheritance taxes can show us how much wealth dead hands relinquish every year, and the certainty of death allows us from this to calculate a total; or plain questions can be asked in census returns and the answers rectified by a coefficient of crookedness. On such bases are framed the estimate that the total wealth of the United States is over $350,000,000,000; of Great Britain something over £20,000,000,000 sterling, or that of Canada about $25,000,000,000. But observe how limited all such estimates are in their significance. Look out over a thousand square miles of unclaimed prairie, verdant and fertile, and you see, with such vision, not a pennyworth of money wealth. Look through a bank window in any market town and you see a ledgerful. The Canadian territory of the Yukon covers over 200,000 squares miles. Its ‘wealth,’ when last heard from in our statistics, was put at $18,000,000 — equal only to that of an average town of 7,000 people. Yet here is a territory spacious as a kingdom, with mountain ranges, waterways, woods and sunken valleys that hide uncalculated quantities of coal and copper, and the prospect of rich alluvial gold.
Such wealth indeed as money counts only comes into being where poverty begins. Only the touch of scarcity can create it. In a world of plenty it would vanish. Such is the unsolved riddle of our economic world, reflected wherever money tries to measure human welfare.
To get a true idea of the imposing wealth of the Empire we must think in terms not of money values, but of physical things — the brick and stone of cities long completed, of towns and cities building still, the farm and fields and homesteads, the machinery of the factories, the paved highways and travelled roads, the 140,000 miles of British Empire railways, all these the product of long generations of industry, not yet ended. With this goes the huge annual production that underlies the commerce and the business of a quarter of the people of the globe; and, most imposing and inspiring of all, the vast undeveloped latent assets of forest and land, minerals and power, still to come into use. Thus in the wealth of the Empire we combine the heritage of the past, the day’s work of the present and the promise of the future.
