THE COLONIAL POLICY OF FRANCE. T HE indications that the French
people are beginning to get uneasy as to the state of their Colonial Empire, and to wonder whether it is worth the cost, are still accumulating. For a long time there has been grumbling about the millions thrown away in Tonquin, the Soudan, and elsewhere ; but while the guns were firing in Madagascar these voices of complaint were mostly sup- pressed as unpatriotic, or even as insulting to the Army,—a phrase which always acts in France as a complete closure. Now, however, that the Madagascar expedition is over, that Simory is more or less quiet, and that there is nothing active doing in Tonquin or on the Siamese frontier, we begin to hear it hinted in the French Press that after all the Colonial Empire is more a burden than a blessing. One newspaper protests against any scheme for raiding the Upper Nile either from the Oubangi or Obok, while another calls attention to the sums spent on the French Soudan. A week ago the Republique Francaise, the organ of M. M61ine and the Protectionists, went even further, and under the heading " Pauvres Colonies," suggested the question,—Is France getting value for her sacrifices in the Colonies ? The French Colonies, says the writer of the article, buy every year some £3,800,000 worth of goods from Fra,uce. But at the same time they buy .R5,000,000 worth of goods from foreign countries. These figures are, however, worse than they look. The £3,800,000 worth of French goods are mostly destined for use in the Army or by the French officials, "and therefore are charged on the metropolitan budget." But to obtain this not very magnificent total of a £3,800,000 trade, France owns to the expenditure in good hard cash of some £2,800,000. No doubt in reality France expends infinitely more than this, for a great part of the sums spent on the troops, and many other items, are not included ; and again, all special charges due to warlike operations are excluded. The .R2,800,000 is merely the sum admitted on the votes to be the sum required every year for normal administration, and apart from extraordinary expenditure. Thus, says M. Maine's organ, these figures show that France spends £2,800,000 a year to get £3,800,000 worth of trade, while foreign nations get a trade of £5,000,000 a year without having to spend a halfpenny-. The moral which the Re'publique Francaise draws, is that the Protectionist screw must be screwed even tighter in order to shut out the foreigner and to keep the French Colonial Empire what it should be,—the happy hunting- ground of the French exporter. The plan of using the Colonies as tied-houses has long been adopted in France, but apparently there has recently been an attempt made to lighten the pressure of the bonds which are literally strangling certain of the Colonies. In the interests of the Colonies, and at the urgent demand of the inhabi- tants, some exemptions and exceptions were lately made by the Colonial Office. Such an infringement of the sacred right of forcing the Colonists to use nothing but goods produced in the mother-country, is most bitterly de- nounced by the Protectionists. The _Republique Prancaise speaks of the "audacious debate" held by the Chamber of Commerce at Saigon, in which the speakers "did not fear to attack French industries in their entirety, and to denounce them as given over to an immovable system of routine, and as incapable of taking the place of foreign products," and complains that the chief assailant of French goods on this occasion has since been made a member of the Colonial Council. That it considers an outrage and an encouragement to the campaign against French industry and the French Customs rigime, on which the whole Press of Indo-China has em- barked. That the protests of the Colonists are pretty strong, is clear from an extract from the Mekong, an important Cochin-China newspaper, which denounces the way in which the fiscal policy pursued by France is ruining the Colony. That it is ruining it we have no sort of doubt. How is it possible that a new, poor, and only seini-civilised community can bear even in a modified form the awful burden of the French Tariff,— a burden which even the French householder, rich and thrifty as he is, finds almost insupportable ? The truth is the French have reproduced the old Colonial system of the eighteenth century in its worst form,—the system which we never adopted in its entirety, and which the War of Independence showed us must be abandoned for a saner and less selfi,h policy. The French burn the candle at both ends. They first make the Colony a burden on•the mother-country, and then strangle the Colony at home, in their efforts to recoup themselves. By their infatuated perseverance in this scheme of action, they half ruin themselves and wholly ruin the Colonies. The evil fiscal results of such a plan are obvious enough. The political are hardly less bad. Since the relations between the Colonies and the mother-country are what we have described, neither really cares for the con- nection. If the mother-country is involved in war, she will make far less effort to keep her Colonies, because that becomes an effort to keep up a drain on resources which are wanted badly to fight the real enemy. Again, the Colonies have no inclination to make a firm stand against invasion. Their sentimental feelings give way to the knowledge that separation from the mother-country will mean an immense stimulus to trade, which will no longer be suffocated by a rigid and exclusive tariff.
The reasons why France has done so ill as a colonising Power are contained in what we have said above. France has failed bemuse she has tried to get too much out of her Colonial possessions. The old notion that unselfishness is the best policy from the point of view of true self-interest, is well illustrated in the region of national expansion. The country which has not attempted to exploit her Colonies in her own selfish interests, is the only country which has succeeded in getting a great Colonial trade and in making her Empire a source of strength rather than of weakness. That the wiser heads in France are beginning to see that the only way to make Colonies a blessing, is not to try to exploit them selfishly, but to render them prosperous communities by acting in their own interests, is clear from the remarkable article on Madagascar, which M. Hanotaux has just written in the Revue de Paris. M. Hanotaux is very anxious that the great island should be kept free from the terrible burdens that attach to a regular French Colony, and therefore urges that it should remain a Protectorate. But M. Hanotaux knows that he will at once be met with the cry, "What good then will the place be to us ? Why have we spent our blood and treasure in acquiring it ?" Hear his answer to this question,— an answer which, if his countrymen are wise, they will read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest :—" I acknow- ledge," he says, "that its recompense cannot be reckoned from year to year in ringing gold, but, what- ever may be said, a Colony is not a farm for development by the mother-country, having only the value which it annually brings in. The expansion of a great Power in the world has quite another character. Transplanting and perpetuating in new countries its name, its language, its influence, and its ideas, a civilised nation has already done a good deal if it thus prolongs in time and space its own existence." M. Hanotaux sees and enumerates other and. more immediate and tangible advantages of Colonial expansion. He speaks of the Algerian soldiers who did such good work in Madagascar, and adds :—" No; the future of the modern Colony lies not merely in the mer- cantile considerations to which the pettiness of certain polemics would fain confine it. It is in the mode of adapta- tion of still barbarous races to the superior civilisation that comes to them." If the French could only be induced to organise their Colonies on the lines suggested here, how much good might they not yet do both to themselves and for the cause of civilisation. The one thing they must learn not to do is to look upon their possessions over-sea as places where French officials can find good "billets," and French manufacturers markets where they will be able to sell inferior goods under the shadow of a protective tariff. We have said something already as to the effects of the close market. The desire to find plenty of places is quite as bad. Look at the case of Tunis, which is only a Pro- tectorate, and so not fully organised. There are only a million and a half of people, and yet there are three thousand French functionaries, exclusive of the soldiers.'• Already, too, the thing is beginning in Madagascar, and the latest telegrams describe Antananarivo as alive with a newly created hierarchy of officials. That is the way A to spoil all. The French have got a magnificent country in Madagascar,—probably the richest and beat tropical possession in the world. We do not grudge it them ; but we do implore them to save it from the functionaries and the tariff,—the phylloxera of the Colonies. Let them try a new system, modelled on that of England—a system a Free-trade and the minimum number of officials—and in ten years compare the result with Tonquin or the Congo. Without doubt they will not only find that com- parison enormously in favour of the free Colony, but they will find also a bigger trade with France and a greater number of French residents living and thriving in the colony itself.
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