Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/382

 trades. At Port Herald begins a railroad one hundred and thirteen miles long, with very stiff grades, running into the interior. There are only four white men employed on the line: the general manager, the traffic superintendent, the chief accountant, and the locomotive foreman. All the telegraphers are negroes, and do their work well for $2.50 a month. In order to become telegraphers, it was necessary for them to learn to read and write English. The head boy in the general offices of the railway, a very capable clerk, gets $3.75 a month. The locomotive engineers are Hindus, and receive $30 a month; but the firemen are all negroes, and receive but $3.75 a month. All the firemen are capable of running engines, and do run them at times. It is only a question of a few years until negroes succeed the high-priced Hindus as locomotive engineers. The section reached by the railroad is devoted largely to tobacco and cotton. One planter has five hundred acres in tobacco, and employs eight hundred natives; it is estimated there that tobacco requires a man and a half to every acre. These natives receive $1.25 a month and board, but their board costs only two cents a day; they eat only corn-meal, which costs a dollar a hundred pounds as a rule. That amounts to less than $2 a month for a good workman. A tobacco planter in Nyasaland is satisfied if he gets five hundred pounds of cured tobacco per acre, one-third of the yield in the United States, and he sells it on an average for seven or eight cents a pound. You would think his freight bill would eat up his profits, but he pays only half a cent a pound for transporting his crop to London. The rate is purposely made very low, to encourage to