Take Rubber, For Example, One Of The Main Exports.
Owing To The Wasteful Methods Employed In Its Collection It Gets
Stamped Out Of Districts.
The trade in it starts on a bit of coast;
for some years so rich is the supply, that
It can be collected
almost at the native's back door, but owing to his cutting down the
vine, he clears it off, and every year he has to go further and
further afield for a load. But his ability to go further than a
certain point is prevented by the savage interior tribes not under
white control; and also on its paying him to go on these long
journeys, for the price at home takes little notice of his
difficulties because of the more carefully collected supply of
rubber sent into the home markets by South America and India;
therefore the native loses, and when he has cleared the districts
reachable by him, the trade is finished there, and he has no longer
the wherewithal to buy those things which in the days of his
prosperity he has acquired a taste for. The Oil Rivers, which send
out the greatest quantity of trade on the West Coast possessions,
subsist entirely on palm oil for it. Were anything to happen to the
oil palms in the way of blight, or were a cheap substitute to be
found for palm oil at home, the population of the Oil Rivers, even
at its present density, would starve. The development of trade is a
necessary condition for the existence of the natives, and the
discovery of products in the forests that will be marketable in
Europe, and the making of plantations whose products will help to
take the place of those he so recklessly now destroys, will give him
a safer future than can any amount of abolitions of domestic
slavery, or institutions of trial by jury, etc.
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