White Labor in Warm is true of white men in the higher positions is far more true of those engaged in manual labor. But the expense of the precautions needed to enable white men to thrive in debilitating climates, especially if their families are to be kept in health and vigor, is so great that few lines of business can afford to keep many white laborers in the tropics. Perhaps some day this will be possible, for in Porto Rico, Cuba, and especially Hawaii, white labor seems to be fairly successful But all of these are islands which are unusually favored climatically because of the trade winds. Queens land is trying to establish a continental colony in her northern territory, but it is too new and too largely composed of people who were born and bred elsewhere to offer any proof as to whether white labor can per manently endure such a climate.
The Improvement of Tropical appears from all this that if the white man is to develop the wealth of tropical countries, one of his first tasks is to take care of the tropical people. Nothing so handi caps and exasperates the tropical planter as the slowness, inefficiency, stupidity, and especially the unreliability of most tropical laborers who work today and are idle tomorrow according to their feelings.
The foundation of this trouble is partly race, but much of it is health, while lack of training and the absence of strong incentives to work are also important. If white men are to realize the vast possibilities of tropical countries one of the first steps is to eradicate the worst tropical diseases. Yellow fever has already almost disappeared, but its ravages were unimportant compared with those of the hookworm disease and malaria. With the eradication of disease must go a change in diet so that the tropical laborer will have enough food at all times and a sufficient variety to insure a fair balance of proteids, fats, and carbo hydrates, and an ample supply of vitamines. That it is possible to eradicate disease and improve the diet is proved by the experience of the United States at Panama and by plantations run by the British and Dutch in the Malay Peninsula and Java. It is not enough, however, to help the men who are now actually at work. They have already acquired a degree of inertia and incapacity which they can never overcome. What is needed is to see that the mothers and children are well fed and kept from disease. If a new generation can grow up with relatively strong bodies and with minds that arc not benumbed by poor food, malaria, hookworm, and other diseases, they will be better able to profit by the training which many philanthropic people are offer ing them. Such training needs to be not merely intellectual, but
moral and physical and to include hygiene and athletics. Healthy tropical children with such a training will presumably grow up not only with better capacities and higher ideals than their parents, but with new desires for the many conveniences and luxuries which serve as incentives to keep the people of more energetic lands hard at work.
Rice Growers; the Highest Native Tropical seen the conditions of agriculture, health, and labor in tropical countries, let us examine the highest type of agricultural community evolved by tropical people unaided by others. The people of such communities raise rice, and are what might be called intensive one-crop horticul turists. They have risen higher than any other type of tropical com munities partly because rice is one of the best tropical foods, partly because its cultivation requires more care than that of most tropical crops, and partly because rice users live in compact, permanent com munities where the opportunities for progress are especially great. In a typical rice-raising community such as Java most of the people live in huts made of poles and covered with high roofs thatched with palm leaves or some similar growth. The houses are usually quite close together, there are abundant trees wherever .they have not been cut off, and the roads are usually rough cart paths. As a rule the rice fields are terraced. The necessity of terracing the fields in such a way that water may flow over the rice very gently and pass from level to level, calls for an infinite amount of patient labor in fashioning and repairing banks of mud and in arranging canals. The care required in cultivating the land, manuring it, plowing it with bullocks, rais ing water to the proper level to flood the fields, transplanting the rice when it is partly, grown, drawing off the water at the right time to permit the crop to ripen well, and care fully harvesting, threshing, and pre serving the grain has greatly aided the de velopment of a rather high degree of indus try and skill similar to that round among market gardeners. Though the rice-raisers of China and India work slowly, they make much better laborers than almost any other tropical people.