MR. KIDD ON THE CONTROL OF THE TROPICS.
WJi are indebted to Mr. Benjamin Kidd. for an exhaustive analysis of one of the most vital of contemporary questions. In the three articles which he has contributed to the Times he has reviewed the various aspects which the relations of Europe to the tropics have successively worn, and has sought to draw from the survey the lesson needed for our own guidance in the matter. "The first principle of the situation," he tells us, is "the utter futility of any policy based on the con- ception that it will be possible in the future to hold our hands and stand aloof from the tropics." There are two reasons which make such an attitude impossible. The first is the extent to which our civilisation rests on the products of the tropics. The second is that the very unlikeliness between these products and those of temperate countries makes trade between the two regions mutually and increasingly profitable. The wants of civilised man are constantly growing, and the machinery for supplying them includes in its sweep a constantly increasing area. Whatever may be the future of the native inhabitants of the tropics, there is no question as to their present inability to meet these wants, except under the control of the white man. All that remains doubtful is the part that the several nations of Europe are to play in providing that control and the best method of applying it.
Mr. Kidd enumerates three such methods. There is first the " plantation " theory. According to this, tropical territory is simply an estate "to be worked for the largest profit it will bring in." Native interests are not considered, except so far as attention to them is likely to promote the interests of the occupying Power. The second method rests on the assumption that what England has done in the way of colonising the temperate regions of the earth other countries may do in the tropical regions. Mr. Kidd regards this method as a "blunder of the first magnitude," since it involves the acclimatisation of the white man to tropical conditions,—an idea which has probably led to "more physical and moral suffering and degradation" than any other which can be named. In the end, however, this second method is simply a return to the first. The land waits for the white colonists who never come, and in the meantime it is worked on the " plantation " system. The third method is the English plan, which differs from the first in that it dis- misses altogether the idea of working the territory for the exclusive benefit of its white possessors, and from the second in that it contemplates the development of the tropical colonies under native direction, the Power which represents civilisation being there only temporarily. This was the conception of the tropics which prevailed in England in the middle of this century. Of late we have come to see that this too is a mistake. The tropics and the tropical races are no field for democratic experiments. But we have had no other conception ready to put in its place, and we have "had therefore to witness the strange spectacle of the revival of the oldest, the most indefen- sible, and in theory the most reprehensible of all forms of government in the tropics,—government by Chartered Company. It was as if successive Governments in England had shirked the national responsibility,—as if they had said : 'We admit the error of the old idea about the tropics, but we do not know where we are. Let any authority undertake the work. Only take the respon- sibility off our hands ' I " With Mr. Kidd's historical survey we are in complete agreement ; when .we turn to the practical conclusions deduced from them they may seem to require a certain amount of criticism, though here, too, we are in the main entirely with him. If the attempt to acclimatise the white man in the tropics is eternally predestined to failure, and if it is equally impossible to leave them to be administered by the native population, we seem thrown back upon government by "a permanently resident class of Europeans cut off from the con- ditions which have produced the European." But this is a very disheartening result, for Mr. Kidd goes on to say that under these conditions "we cannot look for good government," and "have no right to expect it." The reason for this condemnation is that "in climatic conditions which are a burden to him, in the midst of races in a different and lower stage of develop- ment, divorced from the influences which have produced him, from the moral and political environment from which he sprang, the white man does not in the end tend so much to raise the kvel of the races amongst whom he has made his unnatural home, as he tends himself to sink slowly to the level around him." All this is undeniable ; but when it has been admitted, what resource is left to ? If the white man cannot live in the tropics, and the coloured man cannot govern them, and a permanently resident caste of Europeans inevitably sinks to the native level, where is the fourth alternative ? The solution that Mr. Kidd provides for us is to be found in the words permanently resident" and " in the end." In the tropics "the white man lives and works," and must live and work, "only as a diver lives and works under water." He must go on breathing the atmosphere of the region "which produced him and to which he belongs." He must recognise that he dwells in the midst of alien religions and alien institutions, and that he is there to administer native laws in the spirit of English civilisation. This is the system which we have found out for our- selves, first in India and then in Egypt. It is not, however, the system under which we originally governed India ; indeed in those days of slow travelling it hardly could have been. Nor need we overlook as completely as Mr. Kidd does the compensating advantages which belonged to the superseded system. The Anglo-Indians of the old school were exposed, no doubt, to the dangers which Mr. Kidd enumerates. But they did in some cases identify themselves with the life and interests of those whom they governed in a way and to a degree which is scarcely approachable by their successors. To go to India for life, and to go to India for a term of years, even a long term of years, are different things, and though the latter may, on the whole and in the great majority of instances, be far the better thing, it is not the same thing, and so may not have some of the advantages which the former system possessed. But, -having in view this great majority of instances, we do not question the superiority of the newer method, or feel any doubt that "the one underlying principle of success in any future relationship to the tropics is to keep those 'who administer the government which represents our civilisation in direct and intimate contact with the standards of that civilisation at its best." No desire to give natives a larger share in administration should be allowed even for a moment to obscure this cardinal maxim.
The one point on which we part company from Mr. Kidd—and even here it is quite possible that we may misunderstand him—is where he goes on to say that the acts of the Government in the tropics should be subjected -to "the continual scrutiny of the public mind at home." 'That scrutiny, he admits, is "often irksome, sometimes even misleading," but it is "always absolutely vital." Now in a sense this is quite true, and, so far as it is true, it is well secured by the arrangements under which the -Government of India is carried on. The Viceroy is in constant touch with the Secretary of State, the opinions of the Viceroy's Council are reviewed and criticised by the Secretary of State's Council, the acts of the high officials who administer the provinces of India may at any moment be criticised by the English Press. But Mr. Kidd's lan- guage is often used in quite a different sense from this. It then means that the acts of the Government of India -ought to be subject to closer and more constant revision by the English House of Commons. The occasions on which "the continual scrutiny of the public mind. at home" have been directed to Indian affairs through this medium have not been so successful as to make us anxious to see more frequent applications of the same kind. A vote of the House of Commons on an exciting popular question is not always a standard of "civilisation at its best" ; quite as often it is, as in the case of vaccination, a standard of civilisation temporarily under eclipse. We do not know that Mr. Kidd would. deny this, and if he does not, the only ground on which we are at issue with him at once disappears.
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