lers,
and their benevolent rulers are urged to teach these benighted
creatures the Christianity of hard and continuous labour.[14] But the
real motive is to secure the greatest amount of profits for the
investors and of tropical produce for the European {96} populations.
Whether even from this point of view a less exacting and ruthless
labour policy might not be desirable need not here be discussed. What
is immediately significant is the immense power of the forces driving
European nations into colonial policies, intended to increase the
export of tropical products.

Because of this demand for tropical produce, tropical markets, tropical
fields for investment, the vast machinery of imperialism is set in
motion. Because of this demand, present and future, European armies
march over deserts and jungles, and slay thousands of natives in
spectacular _battues_. To satisfy the needs of European populations
and adventurers, millions of brown men toil in the crowded, dirty
cities of India, on sun-lit plantations in Java and Egypt, in the
cotton fields of Nigeria and Togo. To grasp this imperialism, to
realise the big, pulsing, dramatic movement of it, one must view the
peons on hennequin plantations, the barefoot Mexican labourers in
silver mines, the rack-rented fellaheen in the Nile Valley, the patient
Chinese and Japanese toilers on the Hawaiian sugar plantations. One
must gain a sense of the dull ambitions and compulsions working on
these men, the desire for the cheap products of Manchester and
Chemnitz, the craving for liquor, the fear of starvation and of the
lash. And as these coloured peoples toil, not knowing for what they
toil, other men in London and Paris, in Berlin, Brussels and New York
are speculating in the securities which represent their toil. They are
buying "Kaffirs" as they once bought "Yankee rails." Seated in their
offices, these white-faced men are irrigating deserts, building
railroads through jungles and wildernesses, and secure in the faith
that all men, black, yellow and brown, can be made to want things and
work for things, are revolutionising countries they have never seen.
Even these organisers, these {97} seemingly omnipotent shapers of the
world, are themselves only half-conscious agents of a vast economic
process not solely desired by a class or nation but dictated by a far
wider necessity. It is a process varied in its many-sided appeal; a
process which reveals itself in the transfu