From what I have seen as tourist and traveller (not as resident) in the West Indies and in the Orient, I have arrived at the following tentative conclusions, viz.:—
That the debilitating effect which the tropics have been observed to exercise upon those who come from temperate regions has been due mainly to the presence of certain diseases which can be done away with.
That the rapid deterioration of the white stock which is usually noticed in the tropics, especially near the equator, is mainly due to the same cause.
But that Anglo-Saxons cannot perform nearly the same amount of hard bodily labour in a constantly hot climate as they can in the temperate zone, and Anglo-Saxon immigrants never will be able to do so. In this I think the Mediterranean races—at all events the Spaniards and Italians—are our superiors.
Whether the descendants of Anglo-Saxon stock who have settled in a tropical country purified from tropical diseases will be able to support continued hard bodily labour better than their immigrant ancestors is a matter about which we have at present no direct evidence.
It may possibly be worth noting, however, that some years ago, when wintering in Manitoba, I found that some of the farmer immigrants from England felt the cold more as the years went by, but that their children born in the country were unaffected by it.
It is the case that in the tropics, particularly in the equable equatorial belt, many evils of the temperate zone are avoided, chiefly those due to cold and to sudden changes of temperature. It is this equatorial belt of equable temperature and heavy rainfall that I chiefly have in mind, for it comprises those vast regions of prolific vegetation which appear capable of supporting so large a population.
The white man already rules, or has marked off for rule, the whole of the equatorial belt, but who is to be the peasant cultivating this belt? In those parts of tropical Asia already peopled by industrious Orientals there can never be a white peasantry. Equatorial Africa presents great differences in different parts with respect to native population, and the question of a possible future for white peasantry is there a complicated one. In South America, however, there are vast equatorial regions either wholly unpeopled, or sparsely inhabited by tribes of that Indian stock which has elsewhere proved so slight an impediment to the establishment of the white labourer. Served by a system of rivers unrivalled elsewhere in equatorial regions, already partitioned among Christian Governments, and for the most part uninhabited, the forests and savannahs of Equatorial South America offer the readiest field for the establishment on a vast scale of a white peasantry under the equator.
By clearing the scrub within one or two hundred yards of his cottage, and by employing wire screens, the cultivator can protect himself against malaria, and his crops come not once, but several times a year.
If the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian peasant were to turn his attention to this field, instead of, or in addition to, that of navvy work, great things might come of it. The circumstance that South America is a Roman Catholic continent, where the Latin races are dominant, would enormously favour the experiment. On the Zone, the Spanish labourer works in order to save and to depart, the milieu being foreign to him and unattractive. In a Latin State it would be different.