as much towards providing for his family as does a man in northern Europe who works throughout the year.
In a debilitating and enervating climate, without the necessity of work, the man who inhabits the tropics not unnaturally lacks the will to develop himself, and also the will to develop the resources of the tropics. Voluntary progress towards a higher civilization is not reasonably to be expected. The tropics must be developed under other auspices than their own. As Professor John E. Commons has well put it: "Where nature lavishes food and winks at the neglect of clothing and shelter, there ignorance, superstition, physical prowess and sexual passion have an equal chance with intelligence, foresight, thought and self-control." The energetic and enterprising nations of the world have not developed under the easiest conditions of life in the tropics. As Edward Whymper's Swiss guide said of the natives of Ecuador: "It would be good for tropical peoples to have a winter."
The Labor Problem in the Tropics.—" What possible means are there of inducing the inhabitants of the tropics to undertake steady and continuous work, if local conditions are such that from the mere bounty of nature all the ambitions of the people can be gratified without any considerable amount of labor?" In these words, Alleyne Ireland well sums up the labor problem in the tropics. If the natives are, on the whole, disinclined to work of their own accord, then eitber forced native labor, which is contrary to the spirit of the times, or imported indentured labor, becomes inevitable if the tropics are to be developed. With few exceptions, and those where the pressure of a large population necessitates labor, effective development has been accomplished only where imported Chinese, Japanese or coolie labor has been employed, usually under some form of contract. Negro slavery began in the West Indies, under early Spanish rule, and its perpetuation was certainly in part aided by climatic controls. The best development of many tropical lands depends to-day upon Chinese or Japanese labor. It will be so in the Philippines.
With a large native class which is indolent, working intermittently for low wages, or which is bound under some form of contract, it follows that the native or imported laboring classes are separated by a broad gulf from the upper, employing class, which is usually essentially foreign and white. The latter class tends to become despotic, the former, servile. Marked social inequalities thus result, accentuated by the fact that the foreign-born white is usually debarred from all hard labor in a hot, tropical climate. White laborers are not likely to become dominant in the tropics for two reasons: first, because the climate is against them; and second, because the native is already there, and his labor is cheaper. White men are not doing the hard daily labor of India, of Java, of the Philippines, or even of Hawaii. They are directing it.
