Taking The Cost Of
Maintenance, Fuel And Working Expenses At 1,200 Pounds A Year (A
Large Estimate) A Capital
Expenditure of 53,000 pounds, (13,000
pounds for the steamer and 40,000 pounds to yield three per cent.
Interest) would enable this steamer to convey, say thirty tons at
the rate of five to ten miles an hour for 1,600 pounds a year. This
makes it possible to convey a ton at the rate of a halfpenny a mile,
while it would require about 53,000 pounds to build a railway only
eighteen miles long."
The Congo Free State railway I am informed, has cost, at a rate per
mile, something like eight times this. Further on Mr. Elliot says:
"In America the surplus population of Europe, and the markets in the
Eastern States have made railway development profitable on the
whole, but in Africa, until pioneer work has been done, and the
prospects of colonisation and plantation are sufficiently definite
and settled to induce colonists to go out in considerable numbers,
it will be ruinous to build a long railway line."
I do not quote these figures to discourage the West Coaster from his
railway, but only to induce him to get his Government to make it in
the proper direction, namely, into the interior, where further
development of trade is possible. Judging from other things in
English colonies, I should expect, if left to the spirit of English
(West Coast) enterprise, it would run in a line that would enable
the engine drivers to keep an eye on the Atlantic Ocean instead of
the direction in which it is high time our eyes should be turned. I
confess I am not an enthusiast on civilising the African. My idea
is that the French method of dealing with Africa is the best at
present. Get as much of the continent as possible down on the map
as yours, make your flag wherever you go a sacred thing to the
native - a thing he dare not attack. Then, when you have done this,
you may abandon the French plan, and gradually develop the trade in
an English manner, but not in the English manner a la Sierra Leone.
But do your pioneer work first. There is a very excellent
substratum for English pioneer work on our Coasts in the trading
community, for trade is the great key to the African's heart, and
everywhere the English trader and his goods stand high in West
African esteem. This pioneer work must be undertaken, or subsidised
by the Government as it has been in the French possessions, for the
West Coast does not offer those inducements to the ordinary
traveller that, let us say, East Africa with its magnificent herds
of big game, or the northern frontier of India, with its mountains
and its interesting forms, relics, and monuments of a high culture,
offer. Travel in West Africa is very hard work, and very unhealthy.
There are many men who would not hesitate for a moment to go there,
were the dangers of the native savagery the chief drawback; but they
hesitate before a trip which means, in all probability, month after
month of tramping through wet gloomy forests with a swamp here and
there for a change, {465} and which will, the chances are 100 to 1,
end in their dying ignominiously of fever in some wretched squalid
village.
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