The Control of the Tropics

Answers

• Q34CIVILIZATION

  Does superiority in industrial or military technology justify one people governing another?

  Yes. The tropics must be administered by the higher civilizations as a trust, because their resources are needed by the world and their peoples cannot develop them alone.

  If we have to meet the fact that by force of circumstances the tropics must be developed, and if the evidence is equally emphatic that such a development can only take place under the influence of the white man, we are confronted with a larger issue than any mere question of commercial policy or of national selfishness. The tropics in such circumstances can only be governed as a trust for civilization, and with a full sense of the responsibility which such a trust involves. The first principle of success in undertaking such a duty seems to the writer to be a clear recognition of the cardinal fact that in the tropics the white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works under water. Alike in a moral, in an ethical, and in a political sense, the atmosphere he breathes must be that of another region, that which produced him, and to which he belongs. Neither physically, morally, nor politically, can he be acclimatized in the tropics. The people among whom he lives and works are often separated from him by thousands of years of development ; he cannot, therefore, be allowed to administer government from any local and lower standard he may develop. If he has any right there at all, he is there in the name of civilization ; if our civilization has any right there at all, it is because it represents higher ideals of humanity, a higher type of social order.

  OCR corrected

  Internet Archive catalogue page (Macmillan, 1898); HathiTrust record; Spectator review of 20 August 1898.