economic purpose comes in—providing an increasingly large market for the absorption of the manufactures of Europe, and an increasing revenue to the local European Government, which that Government, if it is in the hands of men of vision and commonsense, will spend upon improving means of communication and locomotion, water supply and sanitation, forestry and agricultural improvements: this is "prosperity." Take a concrete case. When I visited Nigeria a year or two before the war, some eight hundred villages in one particular district had been taught by the Forestry Department to start plantations of rubber. At that time the potential wealth of these native communities in their rubber plantations amounted already to several hundreds of thousands of pounds, and was, of course, increasing year by year. In due course they would gather and prepare that rubber. They would sell it to European merchants, and they would buy with the equivalent the merchandise of Europe. They would be purchasers of European goods on the basis of the intrinsic value of the article their labour had produced. A party of European capitalists came along one fine day, saw these flourishing native plantations, and proposed to the Administration that they should buy them up. They were told that the land belonged to the natives, not to the British Government, and that the plantations were the property of the owners of the land. Now what would have happened if these gentlemen had had their way, from the standpoint of the economic relationship of these particular native communities with Europe? Simply this—instead of being purchasers of European goods to the extent represented by the intrinsic value of the article they produced, they would have sunk to the level of wage earners on plantations henceforth owned by European concessionaires. Their purchasing capacity in terms of European goods would therefore have enormously declined, and the trade of the dependency would have suffered in the same proportion.
The economic purpose of Europe in tropical Africa, properly understood and judiciously directed, requires a free African labour, profiting from its activities, working under the stimulus which comes of the knowledge that the material reward of its labour is assured to it. That economic purpose requires that the African producer of raw material for the world's markets shall be encouraged
