Finn lice 59 



Thus spoke Country Life of May 10, and we fully endorse 

 all they have said. At the same time we cannot help 

 feeling how ver}' little the Government of this country has 

 done to improve matters, as described above, and to show 

 its appreciation of the energy and enterprise, as well as of 

 the set-backs and sufTering which have been the lot of 

 those pioneers who have dived into the hinterland and un- 

 known areas of the Tropics, in order to send us unstinted 

 supplies of raw material and foodstuffs, to keep our factories 

 busy, and to feed the great British public. .\nd are the 

 British public, or the Government elected by tliem, 

 grateful .'' We fear not — ^neither grateful nor appreciative. 

 In their ignorance or indifference as to where the supplies 

 come from they take no precautions to safeguard the con- 

 tinuance of them ; they do not even set aside a small 

 fraction of what this country spends to carry on the work 

 of the Schools of Tropical Medicine or to establish Colleges 

 of Agriculture in the Tropics. What has been done to 

 further the first of these two worthy and indispensable 

 " Insurance" schemes has hitherto been done entirely by 

 private effort and exertion. Mr. Lewis (now Viscount) 

 Harcourt says nice things about the idea of establishing 

 tropical agricultural colleges, and Mr. Austen Chamberlain 

 is doing magnificent work, as a private individual, by 

 dragging in tens of thousands of pounds for the London 

 School of Tropical Medicine, and we are sincerely grateful 

 for the same. What we maintain, however, is that a 

 leading man like Mr. Chamberlain should never have 

 been compelled to give up his time to go begging for that 

 money which a really appreciative country should be only 

 too ready to expend on those who sacrifice so much to feed 

 the public and keep them in employment. If the 

 Exchequer is driving us crazy or into prison to make us 

 spend millions on national health insurance and national 

 education ; schemes which tap the lowest strata of this 

 country, those who are a hindrance and no help ; surely a 

 fraction of the amount thus spent would be wisely 

 expended on a tropical health insurance and a tropical 

 educational insurance on similar lines for the benefit of 

 planters, if only to safeguard and improve the workers 

 overseas, as we are doing to the public here, so as to 

 enable them to be of greater use to this country than they 

 can ever be without this help. Although, undoubtedly, 

 this ought to be done we do nothing ; we do even worse 

 than nothing — we put exceedingly heavy taxes on the 

 produce shipped to us by our children overseas, to help 



