The Labour Question. 275 
tries on a limited labour supply is a policy doomed to failure, that the 
wealth of the Rothschilds, if we had it at our disposal, can only be 
beneficially applied to the economic development of the colony through 
the medium of an adequate labour supply, and that railways, while they 
are powerful means of opening up a country, require a labour force in the 
country to make them effective. I have heard of many different kinds 
of railway, but never of one whose rolling stock when not in use as 
rolling stock could be put to work, planting rubber, limes or coconuts, 
bleeding balata or rubber, or cutting timber and digging gold and 
diamonds. 
WILL A RartLway ATTRACT POPULATION ? 
The railway folk, it is true, tell us that the railway will attract 
population, But the examples of growth of population following on 
railway construction which they cite are not convincing. ‘They usually 
bring up the case of some country with a cold climate which is open to 
settlement by the surplus population of Europe. Now a railway built in 
a tropical country, if it is to attract labour which is to be of any use to 
such a country, must attract tropical labour, and this it cannot do, simply 
because the people are not there to be attracted. The tropics in the 
present day are, taken as a whole, the most sparsely populated portion 
of the earth. 
I make the above statement on the authority of Mr. Alleyne Ireland, 
a man whose opinion is entitled to respect. He has devoted some 16 
years of his life to travelling about in the tropics (the Heat Belt, as he 
calls it) studying tropical systems of administration and tropical economic 
development. The statement appears in one of his books “ The Far 
Eastern Tropics” And what adds to the value of it is that he builds no 
theories on 1t. He simply gives the ficts as he has ascertained them and 
there leaves the matter. I have not got the book by me at the present, 
but, briefly put, the substance of his statement is that the majority of 
tropical countries are short of the labour necessary for their full economic 
development. He mentions only five countries in the Heat Belt as known 
to him that are sufficiently supplied with labour—Barbados, Porto Rico, 
Cuba, Java, and India. 
The majority of tropical countries are poorly populated according 
to him, and those that have a sufficient population for their needs are 
the minority. 
ERRONEOUS EUROPEAN IDEAs. 
This statement of Mr. Ireland is a flat contradiction of the view 
usually held among the great Northern people, both those who own 
colonies and those who do not, and I will doubtless be told that if it is a 
case of Mr. Ireland against the world the world would have the vote of 
most people. To this I reply that the seeming contradiction arises from 
the fact that Mr. Ireland is describing the conditions of to-day, while the 
idea of the Northern peoples as to the density of tropical populations 
