COLONIAL EXPANSION AND FOREIGN TRADE. 69 



or a little over one third eleven millions of trade against fourteen 

 millions of direct expense. The contributions to the American col- 

 onies are but $2,000,000, inclusive of about $1,000,000 to the penal 

 establishment at Cayenne. 



Italy's demonstration of the extent to which this madness can 

 carry otherwise sane statesmen is fresh in everybody's memory. 

 Outside of Russia, the poor meaning the working classes are in no 

 country of Europe as poor as in Italy. If we take the production 

 per acre in all the cereals as a gauge of interior development, then 

 no European country west of Russia, not excepting Spain, is in a 

 more backward state. Wise statesmanship would have found here 

 a field for cultivation sufficiently large to tax all its energies. The 

 peaceful acquisitions of industry did not satisfy the ambition of the 

 Government. Conquests in equatorial Africa were deemed more 

 essential to the kingdom's material welfare, but lately freed from 

 the deadening grasp of clericalism and absolutism, than the improve- 

 ment of opportunities lavishly present at home. What she has cul- 

 tivated at an enormous expense of blood and treasure has borne the 

 ordinary harvest of failure and disaster. The entire import trade of 

 Massowah, to which the whole world contributed, and which is largely 

 a transit trade, amounts to about $5,000,000. The expenditure 

 on account of her Red Sea possessions for the year 1895-'96 is given 

 in the Statesman's Year Book as 123,738,064 lires ($24,000,000). 

 The contribution to the maintenance of this her " white man's bur- 

 den," from 1882 to 1895, was 303,905,926 lires. At present (1897- 

 '98), after the sobering lesson received in 1896, the net expense is 

 about $3,500,000 (17,000,000 lires). 



The three powers France, Italy, and Germany point a les- 

 son of unmistakable significance. The figures speak for themselves. 

 No amount of expense can make the African and the Asiatic con- 

 sume an appreciable amount of European merchandise. No amount 

 of cultivation can make the tropics endurable to the northern man 

 Labor and exertion on his part under the rays of a deadly sun and 

 a miasma-breeding soil are entirely out of the question. Those who 

 would make the endeavor in the manner of the temperate zone would 

 only succeed the sooner in reaching the end of white man's settlement 

 in the tropics, disease and death. 



Many point to the Dutch East India settlements as a successful 

 commercial enterprise. But, taking the best construction given to 

 the story from the trader's point of view, the present satisfactory 

 conditions have been reached after a great deal of disappointment, 

 loss, and bloodshed. A large revenue is acquired from Government 

 sales of colonial produce; still, with all this added to the other 

 revenues from land tax, excise, and other duties, the Government has 



