Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/78

68 Government to the administration fund of the African colonies was $2,194,000 in 1896-'97. This does not include the expense of maintaining the military and naval forces stationed in the African settlements. The annual importations of all the colonies amounted (in 1897) to $2,261,000, inclusive of New Guinea. So it costs the Government more than one dollar to enable its citizens to do a dollar's worth of trade. The population is estimated at 10,200,000. What possibilities stretch out before us, if they could be made to wear shirts or uniforms like the native police force, which has been organized at Cameroon! The extent of the territory, however, precludes the possibility of successfully conducting the missionary effort to induce them to wear clothes. The question also remains open what return could be made, even if the recipients could be brought to appreciate the advantage of a fuller covering of their nakedness than the traditional one.

France is in possession of territories in Africa, the population of which is on a more advanced status. The territories of the Senegal have been under French dominion for a period of two hundred years and more, and trade relations with the Senegal and Soudan have been assiduously cultivated. In Asia, Tonquin and Annam were to open the road to a very active trade with China. She has held undisputed lodgment since 1814 in Pondicherry and other towns in India that remained over to her from her East Indian empire conquered by Dupleix and abandoned by Louis XV's weak policy. Still, with all the tender care and an expenditure for the colonial service, as per budget of 1898, of about 80,000,000 francs, and not counting the colonial expense état of the ministry of war and of the navy, the entire export trade of France to her Asiatic possessions is 35,000,000 francs; to her African dominions, outside of Algiers, 22,000,000 francs; and to her American possessions, with barely five hundred thousand inhabitants, 35,000,000 francs. The territories to which this trade caters have a population of about twenty-two million in Asia and twenty-five million in Africa. If we include the French islands in America and French Guiana, the exports of French merchandise to all her colonies amount to about 95,000,000 francs. If we include the allowance for colonial service from the naval and military budget, France has an expense that exceeds the amount of her colonial export trade. How much better off France would be if she would drop this burden! She could do the same trading and save her money, annually wasted, and her men annually slaughtered to the mania of colonial expansion.

The forty-five millions peopling the French possessions in Asia and tropical Africa consume altogether about $30,000,000 worth of foreign imports. The French share of this is about $11,000,000,