If White Control
Advances And Plantations Are Not Made And Trade With The Interior Is
Not Expanded, The Condition Of The West African Will Be A Very
Wretched One, Far Worse Than It Was Before The Export Slave-Trade
Was Suppressed.
In the more healthy districts the population will
increase to a state of congestion and will starve.
The Coast
region's malaria will always keep the black, as well as the white,
population thinned down, but if deserted by the trader, and left to
the Government official and the missionary, without any longer the
incentive of trade to make the native exert himself, or the
resulting comforts which assist him in resisting the climate, which
the trade now enables him to procure, the Coast native will sink,
via vice and degradation, to extinction, and most likely have this
process made all the more rapid and unpleasant for him by incursions
of the wild tribes from the congested interior.
I do not cite this as an immediate future for the West African, but
"a little more and how much it is, a little less and how far away."
Remember human beings are under the same rule as other creatures; if
you destroy the things that prey on them, they are liable to
overswarm the food-producing power of their locality. It may be
said this is not the case; look at the Polynesians, the South
American Indians, and so on. You may look at them as much as you
choose, but what you see there will not enable you to judge the
African.
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