On the plantations these things are beginning to be changed. The plantations are usually owned and managed by Europeans or Americans who have a permanent interest in them. On the best and most profitable plantations the employees are obliged to live in better houses, and take more care of health and sanitation than tropical people ever thought of before. Drains are dug, stagnant pools are filled, and other measures are taken to get rid of mosquitoes and other disease-bearing insects. Machinery is introduced, and the natives are taught to use it. At first they are rarely competent for any but the simplest tasks. Little by little, however, they acquire skill and industry. Preference is given to those who work regularly, keep their huts neat, obey the health regulations, and show evidence of willing ness and ability to learn the complicated methods of the white man. Another incentive to progress is the desire to imitate the white man and purchase some of the luxuries displayed in the company stores.
On the plantations health is considered of great importance. Hospitals are provided not only for the white man, but for the natives. Where the government does not support them as in Ceylon, they are often run by private companies, as a matter of economy. The largest fruit company in tropical America regularly deducts 2 per cent from the wages of employees from the highest to the lowest, and uses the money as a fund to protect the general health. Thus the strength of the natives is not sapped by disease so much as formerly, and they are better able and more willing to do hard work.
As the plantations increase in number, the population grows more dense. In certain places such as parts of Java the land is so fully
occupied that there cease to be large waste areas where lazy natives can pick up a living on wild fruits. Thus while the plantations provide the opportunity for steady work, they are also making it less easy for people to get a living unless they settle down to such work. Of course it is still difficult to find tropical people who will work except when compelled to do so by hunger, but the standards of life are beginning to rise. This is bound to happen more and more, for the tropical zone to-day offers perhaps the largest and richest of all fields for the investment of capital and brains.
The Successful Plantations of Java.—Java under Dutch rule has carried the plantation system farther than any other country. There rice-growing and plantations under European management combine to encourage steady work to a degree scarcely equaled in any other tropical region unless it be Barbadoes and Jamaica. As one re sult the population has increased enormously. We have no figures for earlier times, but in the last forty years, without immigration, the population has doubled. On the less rainy north side of the island where tropical jungle prevailed before it was cleared, large areas sup port from 1000 to 1200 people per square mile. This is even more dense than the population of manufacturing countries like Belgium and England. Yet so rich are the lands near the equator that Java does not raise nearly as much food as she might if her people had the energy of the temperate zone.