THE FUTURE OF THE EMPIRE : III. THE CROWN COLONIES
By SIR DONALD CAMERON
[This is the third of a series of six articles on Imperial problems. Next week General Sir Ph,' Burnett-Stuart writes on Imperial Defence] UNDER the general description " Crown Colonies " is included a group of dependencies differing far too widely in magnitude, importance, geographical situation and political development to lend themselves to any general characterisation. That scattered diversity of lands and peoples and conditions of life must be pictured on more than one screen—and there can be no hope of dealing with it adequately within the limits of an article such as this. But there are two postulates which may be accepted as of general application. First, that we must devote every effort to promote the material and moral progress and social advancement of the people entrusted to our charge; secondly, that modern British colonial policy broadly has for its object the development of free institutions in the dependent countries and ultimate autonomy. I express the first in the words of the Mandate for Tanganyika; those responsible for their use chose them well; social advance- ment and moral progress can follow only, they cannot precede, progress in material things. This is, I believe, a practical conclusion that cannot be assailed, at least in our dependencies in the tropical belt of Africa.
It is true that there was an age in which it was argued that the people of Nigeria could be completely self- contained, pursuing their own life in their own natural surroundings, growing subsistence-crops and utilising forest produce for sale where it might be available. This is what I have called the Garden of Eden conception. But it over- looked one compelling and malignant factor; the Garden is not as God first made it; sickness and death had entered into it. If the great masses of Nigeria—there are millions of them—produce little more than subsistence-crops the central Government could not acquire the revenue to achieve anything of value to protect the people from disease and provide the other social and transport services that are essential if their condition is not to remain stagnant. These things cannot be achieved by permanent subsidies from the mother country. Imagine the condition of a people left to pursue their own rude life in a locality riddled by sleeping-sickness: why, in spite of our strenuous and costly efforts in that field wide tracts of country in Nigeria have already been left desolate to the tsetse fly.
Moral progress depends on social advancement, the latter on progress in material things—a governing consideration in the case of subject people in territories such as Nigeria, and I should not at this stage attempt to hazard a guess at the political future of that country. It is idle to do so until a great deal more has been accomplished in promoting the material progress of the people. That is the ever- present and over-riding problem of the country, and so far scarcely its fringes have been touched. With exceptions almost negligible, the people have no capital; practically the whole of the money invested in the country represents foreign capital which has to be remunerated abroad. In addition, there are other large invisible imports, and a comparison of the value of Nigeria's exports and imports taken baldly from the Customs returns discloses an entirely false picture of the balance of trade.
We have endeavoured to improve these conditions by teaching animal husbandry to the people in the north, whereby a man and his family may cultivate eight to ten acres instead of scraping at one, but if he increases his cash- income eightfold in this way it would even then be not much more than five pounds a year. In the south we are having some success in inducing the people to cultivate the oil-palm and to use presses for the extraction of the oil instead of their own crude processes. They find in this a remunerative undertaking, but progress is necessarily slow and the scheme received no real impetus until a new head of the Executive made it his own special business some seven years ago.
The system of " indirect " administration through the people's own institutions is, I believe, now progressing well. A new and more liberal conception has been established in regard to the system generally in the Northern Provinces —its old home, and in the Southern Provinces the retiring Chief Commissioner recently stated in legislative council that in all his experience of 27 years he had never known the people better contented; they heartily approve of the new system of native administration and native courts set up in recent years. The Legislative Council is, in my judge- ment, doing useful work, and the nominated African section is being gradually extended so as to embrace the interests of new tribes. It is incorrect to say that the African members represent no one but themselves—four of them, indeed, are elected by direct suffrage—and if there were no such council the Governor would have to rule as an autocrat, a role that no wise man would wish to assume.
The Gambias, Nyasaland, and Northern Rhodesia (where unfortunately the mineral royalties are paid to the Chartered Company), are all probably too small economically to support the heavy charges for a hierarchy of their own. In Sierra Leone some attention is now being devoted to a Pro- tectorate greatly neglected until recent years; it is probably more backward than the general picture I have drawn of the Nigerian Protectorate. The Colony, with its distinct, and in a measure alien, population, some deriving from the tribes in Nigeria, is apparently very political minded. The Gold Coast is probably the most difficult problem of the West African dependencies, owing to the complete lack, over so many years, of any definite policy in native affairs in the Colony proper. Unlike Nigeria, the system of chiefs appears to be retarding, rather than assisting, the general progress of the people; the tendency is in fact still reaction- ary. Some advance in utilising the chief-system in the administration of native affairs generally is, however, being made in Ashanti and the Northern Territories.
Kenya bristles with questions of difficulty; perhaps the most important is whether a European community can found itself permanently on the highlands of the equator, economically and climatically—a problem not yet solved. The place which that community is to occupy in the political constitution has also to be determined. Obviously the Africans must eventually be admitted to an adequate share in the political system of their own country, a place com- pletely denied to them at present by settler feeling openly declared.
Taking the rest of the Colonial domain, the sugar colonies, mainly in the West Indies, seem to present the least difficult problem, inasmuch as their main export is the only one of British colonial major production that can be absorbed entirely by the mother country, which, for that reason, is in a position to secure an adequate price for colonial sugar in its own markets without hardship to its consumers. It is argued that the existing imperial preference costs the British taxpayer not less than four millions sterling a year. If that means that the Exchequer loses that sum annually because British colonial sugar is admitted at a lower rate of duty, the answer is that if it were on the higher tariff the cost would obviously be passed on to the consumer-taxpayer. If the argument is that without the preference all sugar would be admitted at the lower rate and that the price to the home consumer could consequently be reduced, the answer is that he is already getting his sugar at a price some- what below the proper market-rate if the colonial producers are generally to pay fair wages to their employees and adequate prices for the canes grown for the factories by the peasant farmers.
The old argument that the cost of producing British colonial sugar is excessive cannot be sustained. Although the wages compare favourably with those paid elsewhere, the cost of producing British colonial sugar has now been reduced to a figure that permits it to compete with the great bulk of the world's cane sugar. Some largely conceived re-settlement scheme in the West Indies will also be necessary, but nothing can supply the same opportunities for labour as the production of sugar. In their present form of separate entities those colonies are too small and economically weak to cast their gaze on political autonomy. After all—though I have no wish to be too heterodox in the views I express—a community that cannot make any material contribution to its own defence has -logically no strong claim to an independence that would be entirely nominal. From the economic point of view, at least, Malaya is not in the same circumstances. The States are wealthy, and now that the system whereby certain States were administered directly and in detail by a British Secretariat has disappeared, the way seems to have been set for an eventual federation of autonomous States whenever that course appears to be wise and in accord with the wishes of all the people con- cerned. Whether the Crown Colony of the Straits Settle- ments would join such a federation is a matter for mere conjecture at present; many years must pass before such a question is presented. In a recent autobiographical sketch Sir Laurence Guillemard writes that although the system of government in the colony is admittedly old-fashioned, and is from time to time the subject of criticism on that account, he believes that it is regarded by the majority of well-informed citizens as better adapted to the peculiar conditions than a constitution on more modem lines.
The lesson I learn from this review of present-day con- ditions is that we must hasten very slowly. The greatest mistake would be to tinker with the various systems, such as they are, merely for the sake of doing something.
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