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2 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY

this liberation of public sympathy the direction of a new development is indicated by circumstances of almost

irresistible significance.

Within the last five-and-twenty years we have acquired in tropical Africa alone territories of which the area exceeds by one-half the whole extent of British India. These, and other colonies and dependencies which lie

within the tropics, now call for some of the same care and attention which have helped to make India

what it is.

In nearly all the tropical colonies there is much fertile land which already produces some of the most necessary and valuable raw materials of trade. Cotton, silk, rice,

rubber, sugar, coffee, tea, oils, drugs, dyes and spices, gold and gems, and other important elements of civilised

industry, are home products of our tropics. But in very few of the colonies have these products been developed to anything approaching the natural capacity of their sources

of origin. In many parts of the colonies the resources of nature have not been cultivated at all. Valuable com-

modities produce themselves and grow wild — unsown, unreaped. The increase which might result to British trade by a mere opening of the markets that lie as yet unapproached within the Empire, is past calculation.

Such opening would necessarily be reciprocal in its action, and every market of supply over which our administration extended would automatically become a market of con-

sumption for manufactured goods. At home the very prosperity of our trade creates a demand for expansion.

And these potential markets are our own. We may do as we will within them.\

The cultivation of our tropical lands involves, we are sometimes told, questions of transport and labour which are too difficult to touch. Of these the question of transport within the limits of our own colonies and protectorates is very largely a question of money, and its difficulties may easily be made to disappear whenever a real demand for transport shall arise. The question of