Page:Dictionary of National Biography, Third Supplement.djvu/136

  your railway and thereby increase the means of traffic and you will take away three-fourths, if not the whole, of the temptation to carry on the slave trade’.

Such being the bent of his mind, it was natural that, after the electors in July 1895 had completely vindicated the action of the House of Lords in rejecting the Home Rule Bill of 1893, Chamberlain should have chosen the office of secretary of state for the Colonies when he joined Lord Salisbury’s government. He informed a supporter that he had accepted the Colonial Office with two objects: first, to see what could be done to tighten the bond between Great Britain and the self-governing Colonies; and, secondly, to attempt to develop the resources of the Crown Colonies, and to increase the trade between them and Great Britain. In a speech (22 August 1895) he described the British tropical colonies as possessions in which it would be necessary to sink British capital. In small things no less than in great, the Colonial Office felt the hand of its new master. It was cleaned up and refurnished, and the maps were brought up to date. A circular of November 1895 instituted an inquiry into the extent of foreign competition in colonial markets, and the reasons for its existence. In the same spirit a Commercial Intelligence Branch of the Board of Trade was opened some four years later, and four trade commissioners were appointed. In the same year (1899) the Treasury was authorized by act of parliament to advance to certain Crown Colonies a sum of nearly three and a half million pounds at 2¾ per cent. repayable in fifty years, Although Chamberlain was by no means the first British minister to show interest in the material development of the Crown Colonies, none before him displayed such energy and capacity in the task. Like many other colonial secretaries, on his assumption of office he found the West Indies in a lamentable plight. The royal commission of 1896 considered the causes of West Indian depression to be permanent, inasmuch as they were largely due to the system of foreign sugar bounties which was not likely to be abandoned. Nevertheless the energy of Chamberlain achieved the apparently impossible; and the Brussels Convention (8 March 1903) abolished, for the time being, the bounty form of protection. Meanwhile, in consequence of the report of the royal commission, a department of agriculture for the West Indies was set on foot, an example that has been followed in Africa and the Far East. West Indian interests were further benefited by an arrangement (April 1900) with Messrs. Elder, Dempster & Co. for a fortnightly service of steamers between England and Jamaica. At the same time Chamberlain’s handling of the Jamaica constitutional question in 1899 proved that he could be as firm as he was sympathetic.

Nor were Chamberlain’s sympathies confined to the West Indies. No one was quicker to realize how essential to the complex life of the modern world is the supply of tropical products; and he at once saw that the policy already adopted of placing the scientific resources of Kew at the disposal of the West Indies was capable of unlimited extension, with the object of making the Empire, as far as possible, self-sufficient.

Perhaps, on this side of his work, Chamberlain’s most unchallenged title to fame was the campaign which he waged on questions of health in tropical countries. In 1897 he realized the necessity of scientific inquiry into the causes of malaria, and of special education for the medical officers of Crown Colonies. He followed eagerly on the trail which had been blazed by Sir Patrick Manson [q.v.]. A circular was issued in 1898, addressed to the General Medical Council and the leading medical schools in Great Britain, which urged the necessity of including tropical diseases in the medical curriculum. A special school of tropical medicine was set on foot in connexion with the Albert Dock branch of the Seamen’s Hospital. The Treasury contributed half the cost; and the colonial governments were asked to concur in arrangements for the training of their medical officers at this school. A little later Chamberlain wrote to [q.v.], inviting the co-operation of the Royal Society in a thorough investigation into the origin, the transmission, and the possible prevention and cure of tropical diseases, especially of the malarial and black-water fevers prevalent on the West African coast. The Royal Society gave a ready response; so that within a year of an address by Sir P. Manson, which gave a lead to the profession, both a school of tropical medicine and a systematic inquiry into the nature of malaria had become accomplished facts. Nor was this all. Another school of tropical medicine was founded in Liverpool, which also owed its origin to the initiative of Chamberlain. Improvements were effected in the form of the medical and sanitary annual reports from the Crown Colonies;  110