Inipcvial Expansion 17 



days to come if the so-called civilized nations are to 

 •continue to increase by being able to satisfy their ever- 

 increasing demand upon the foodstuffs and raw materials 

 that the Tropics can alone produce for us and which 

 Europe, America, Australia must all have, as the Central 

 Powers, and especially Prussia, have learned to their cost. 

 Meanwhile, I would claim that those who have had to do 

 with natives and especially those who have watched the 

 white and coloured men when handling the labour gangs, 

 kindly or otherwise (and through not understanding the 

 men, through impatience, fatigue or other causes, it has 

 too often been a case of otherwise), will agree with 

 Monsieur Cureau when he tells us, on p. 37 of his book, 

 that we must remember that every man has in front of 

 his judgment something which is like a bit of coloured 

 glass and which represents an aggregate of inherited or 

 acquired ideas, prejudices, interests, desires and sensations 

 that are derived from tradition, physiological or patho- 

 logical peculiarities and surrounding influences. Thus it 

 is that men should be made to study anthropology and be 

 trained before being placed in charge of native labour, 

 because otherwise when the untrained white man tries to 

 understand and fix the ideas behind the black man's mind 

 in his own, he is inclined to fail, since, as with a kaleido- 

 scope, every time he looks into it the ideas take on new 

 shapes and colours and the unexpected is ever happening. 

 Thus it comes about that the untrained man being un- 

 prepared for the emergencies that arise is inclined to lose 

 his patience and friction, loss of time, reduced output and 

 other troubles frequently result. For several years past 

 I have been trying to realize that, since we are already 

 feeling the shortage of coloured labour (and we shall feel 

 it with a vengeance when the War is over and all the 

 nations fly to the Tropics to feed themselves to repletion 

 and to lay up a stock, in order that they shall not go 

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