Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/554

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ONTROL of trade routes and mineral supplies have been the two chief factors in determining the industrial and political supremacy of races and nations. It is evident that a third—the control of the food supplies from the tropics—will soon be equally vital to civilized man. The tropical zone is a great laboratory where nature's forces are manufacturing food on a tremendous scale. There the sun's vivifying rays fall in the greatest abundance, building up with a rapidity impossible in the temperate parts of the globe the elements of the air, water and soil in those complex compounds which are the essential basis of life. Leaving out of consideration the dream that inventive genius may some day devise artificial methods of employing the sun's chemical forces in directly producing food, it is certain that if he continues to multiply in his present geometrical ratio, the European must utilize the tropics.

India and the east already contain a dense population; but the negroes who inhabit tropical Africa do not begin to exhaust its potential resources, and South America, the queen of the continents from an economic standpoint, is virtually untouched. How and by whom shall these regions be occupied and developed? Three solutions are possible:

1. Races predominantly black or yellow, who shall have developed among themselves or acquired from the whites economic and political efficiency, may be the future masters of the now unoccupied parts of the tropical zone. Southern China is a proof that such an outcome is possible.

2. Colored people under the direction and government of northern nations may cultivate the soil and export the surplus. This would be something parallel to the present condition of India.

3. The whites of European descent may themselves emigrate to the tropics, crowd out or absorb the colored races, and either pure, or predominating in the resulting mixture, constitute the bulk of the population.

The last alternative is rarely taken into consideration, because it is an accepted commonplace of popular belief and scientific discussion that the white man is not fitted to the tropics—that the European