French colonialism

“ But it is just this which has made us successful colonists, and it is the absence of this which makes French colonies dead failures. Whereas we and the Germans pour forth tens of thousands of emigrants, France sends to her North African Settlements just over six hundred persons per annum—and they are nearly all officials. ”

“ Of the German colonial empire, four times as big as the fatherland, not a spot exists that is not in the hands of the Allies today. England holds the greater part; Japan has Tsing-Tao; France a considerable part of the African possessions.
Now let us look at the picture the French colonial empire offers.
In 1914 France ruled, in the north of Africa, over five and a half millions of natives in Algiers, two millions in Tunis and four millions in Morocco. ”

“ I have but proved the necessity of French colonial expansion in colonies of exploration.
If we wish to turn our distant possessions to account, the criminal of yesterday, the dangerous member of society, might go there, and in directing industrial or commercial enterprises find legitimate employment and a fair return for all his intelligent efforts and for the work and study of his youth.
There is plenty of labour to be obtained out there, for it is only the natives, of whatever tribe or colour, whose temperament is hostile to manual work. ”

“ At all events, we may safely assert that France would have saved sixty millions of pounds, and the interminable prospect of a proportional annual expenditure, had she confined herself to the town and fortress of Algiers; and England would have been richer and wiser, had she kept within the bounds of the original Dutch colony. The best thing we ourselves can do with our extra-tropical Africa, is to leave the colonists to govern, and also to defend themselves from all but enemies by sea: that the French, unfortunately, cannot do. ”

“ When I think of the colonies established along the coast of Africa—of Algiers, conquered and civilized—of the increasing wealth and intelligence of Hayti—of the powerful efforts now being made all over the world to sway public opinion in favor of universal freedom—of the certain emancipation of slaves in all British Colonies—and above all, the evident union of purpose existing between the French and English cabinets,—I can most plainly see the hand of God working for the deliverance of the negroes. We may resist the blessed influence, if we will; but we cannot conquer. ”

“ The demand made by France, if acceded to, meant the death-blow to English colonization on the American mainland; and yet it was made not without reason. French explorers, missionaries, and fur-traders had, with great enterprise and fortitude, swarmed over the entire region, carrying the flag, the religion, and the commerce of France into the farthest forest wilds; while the colonists of their rival, busy in solidly welding their industrial commonwealths, [pg 307] had as yet scarcely peeped over the Alleghany barrier. ”

“ There are seven hundred German colonists, all told, in the German colonies, and each of them costs the German tax-payer little short of eight hundred a year. How many of them are in the English colonies? And what's the reason? Why, they want to have the institutions of the Fatherland ready-made in five minutes. They need the colonies made before they can prosper in it. The French are better, but they are spoilt by officialdom. The Englishman just adapts himself to the conditions, and sets to work to adapt the conditions to himself too. ”

“ France during the war established conscription in her African territories and, in spite of a somewhat bloody rebellion by the ignorant savages, who thought the slave trade was being reëstablished, succeeded in importing to France a black army which at one time numbered 600,000 fighting men. With a little more energy and greatly increased territories, that number might be trebled. France is a smaller nation than Germany; but France plus Algeria, Tunis, Morocco, Senegambia, French Congo, and the new German territories is a much larger nation than Germany without colonies. ”

“ But colonialism in its harshest forms is not only the exploitation of new nations by old, of dark skins by light, or the subjugation of the poor by the rich. My Nation was once a colony, and we know what colonialism means; the exploitation and subjugation of the weak by the powerful, of the many by the few, of the governed who have given no consent to be governed, whatever their continent, their class, their color. ”

“ He knows, he says, that all the countries suitable for colonization—Australia was the last of them—are already occupied by “our rivals,” but there is still room, he thinks, for French “colonies of exploration,” where talented young men, unable to find a career in their native country, may usefully employ their energies in turning the natural wealth of French acquisitions to account. ”

“ The English colonists, less under the direct protection of the mother country, learned to defend themselves against the Indians, and were better able to help the mother country against their common foe, the French.
Taken all in all, the situation was favorable to Great Britain. As long as French monarchs wasted the resources of France in Europe, they could scarcely hope to cope with the superior navy, the thriving commerce, and the more populous colonies, of their ancient enemies. ”

“ Remember, that for modern civilisation among the Outeroos, the world is indebted to the colonial enterprise and success of Britain; but remember, too, that it is not always the ‘colonising nations,’ but the ‘colonists’ of the ‘colonising nations,’ that carry the standard of social progress to advanced grounds. ”

“ It is unscientific to maintain at this late day that the French are incapable of colonizing when they have so powerfully aided in forming the great English colonies in Canada, India, and Egypt and are actually colonizing Algeria and Tunis. ”

“ It was not policy, it was not system, which gave North America to the English rather than to the French, and yet there was a certain gain even from the utter absence of both policy and system. Natural forces had more play on the English side than on the French, and in a sense it might be said of the English colonies that their strength was to sit still. ”

“ However, long before they were strong enough to assert the rights thus granted or to gather intelligence enough for proper group leadership, the new colonialism of the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries began to dawn. ”

“ The disposition of the French Crown to interfere with the fur-trade and to repress all commercial initiative not emanating from privileged circles, was but an evidence of its general colonial policy. The colony on the St. Lawrence was made continually to feel the hand of the king. In contrast to the free town and county systems of the English, the people of New France had no voice in their government or in the appointment of their officials. ”

“ On the eve of the great Revolution, France possessed, as I have said, the finest colony in the world. Her historians are never weary of enumerating the amount of its products, the great trade, the warehouses full of sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo, and cocoa; its plains covered with splendid estates, its hill-sides dotted with noble houses; a white population, rich, refined, enjoying life as only a luxurious colonial society can enjoy it ”

“ For the same reason this decision ought not to please our French Allies, who, besides sacrificing men and money on the battlefields of Continental Europe, must provide more men and money to guard their colonial possessions in different parts of the globe. ”

“ We English hug to ourselves the idea that the French are bad colonists: if so, France, like China and India, is improving at a pace which promises trouble. Algeria, Senegambia, and Siam should considerably modify the old judgment. Our neighbours have, and honestly own to, two grand faults--an excessive bureaucracy and a military, or rather a martinet, discipline, which interferes with civil life and which governs too much. ”

“ Colonies, we call them, these places where "niggers" are cheap and the earth is rich; they are those outlands where like a swarm of hungry locusts white masters may settle to be served as kings, wield the lash of slave-drivers, rape girls and wives, grow as rich as Croesus and send homeward a golden stream. They belt the earth, these places, but they cluster in the tropics, with its darkened peoples: in Hong Kong and Anam, in Borneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, in Panama and Havana—these are the El Dorados toward which the world powers stretch itching palms. ”

“ So we have no hesitation in saying, a thing patent to every unprejudiced observer, that the aborigines of the conquered colonies of Great Britain are treated better by their conquerors than they ever treated themselves. The Africans, in the conquered colonies of Africa, are better off under British rule than those colonies or portions unconquered are. The hosts of India enjoy more, fare better in every grace and virtue in all that goes to adorn and develop mankind, under the British government and protection than they ever did or would under self-government. ”

“ We want to start, or at least very greatly to strengthen, the notion of colonization on its Imperial, as apart from its individual practical, side; to treat it as a change of homes; to bring before every man, woman, and child who migrates from England to other parts of the Empire that he is, indeed, moving within the family; that he is a living, and therefore a most powerful, factor in the continual renewing of the ties sometimes fretted by the strain of mere space distance; that upon him, in the aggregate, and not on statesmen, soldiers, or sailors, falls the responsibility of Empire. ”

“ The French, in a word, have no success in their attempts anywhere at colonization; they are not practical colonists. The absence of this faculty, if one may call it so, is doubly apparent in the Southern hemisphere, where they are surrounded on all hands by English colonies. True it is, the 251English also have usually acquired by the strong hand their possessions in Oceania, in Australia, in Asia, &c., and from the stand-point of humanity it is impossible always to defend the means by which they have made themselves masters of the fairest and most fertile countries on the globe. ”

“ It is clear to Us that colonialism, defined in the classic sense, is forever finished, both in Africa and in Asia. Its last remaining vestiges are being systematically attacked and destroyed. The major powers not entirely voluntarily and not without the exertion of continuing pressure - for History knows of few instances where colonial powers have, of their own free will, relinquished control of a dependent people - have admitted that the system is out of date, and have acted to change it. ”

“ These are the objections the African Colonization Society offer to this community to our remaining in this country—in the land of freemen! These are the considerations that prompt them to tell us that we the descendants of Africa can never be men unless we abandon the land of our birth, our homes and people, and submit to that uncongenial clime, the barbarous regions of Africa, amidst unyielding contagion and mortality! O, that man would remember, that knowledge and virtue, not complexion, are the emblems that constitute the value of human dignity! ”

“ For Anatole France, the colonial mania is purely economic, and he considers that Japan has done a great service to the union of races by compelling the white man to respect the yellow; he does not despair even of the black, who, he points out, are evolving in South America, growing educated and much superior to the Europeans of 2000 B.C. Of course this means “no more colonies,” which he looks upon as swindles, for “France has expended men and money so that the Congo, Cochin-China, Annam, Tonkin ... ”

“ With inherent instinct, the British Government recognizes that the real asset of the colony is the indigenous inhabitant, whose material and moral progress is not only the first, but the truest interest of the State. ”

“ How is it, as I have already observed, that all the colonies founded by other nations, either languish or have been swept away,—not all, perhaps, as yet, but the major portion of them; while every colony founded by our little island appears to flourish, till it becomes so powerful as not only no longer to require the nursing of the mother country, but to throw off its dependence, and become a nation of itself? How is it that it can so truly be said that the sun never sets upon the English flag? ”

“ One thing is, however, indispensable to the success of this or any other system of Colonial Government. You must renounce the habit of telling the Colonies that the Colonial is a provisional existence. You must allow them to believe that, without severing the bonds which unite them to Great Britain, they may attain the degree of perfection, and of social and political development, to which organised communities of free men have a right to aspire. ”

“ The colonial system by which this whole hemisphere was bound has fallen into ruins, totally abolished by revolutions converting colonies into independent nations throughout the two American continents, excepting a portion of territory chiefly at the northern extremity of our own, and confined to the remnants of dominion retained by Great Britain over the insular archipelago, geographically the appendages of our part of the globe. With all the rest we have free trade, even with the insular colonies of all the European nations, except Great Britain. ”

“ Thus, even leaving sentiment aside, the balance of material advantage to the Colonies is great and real; while their self-government is complete, for the mother country never interferes with any matters of colonial concern, unless in the rare cases where a matter primarily local may affect the general relations and interests of the whole empire. ”