elf
increasing. In the decade 1800-1810, the increase was 6.3 millions; in
the nine succeeding decades it was 7.8; 13.5; 11.3; 9.6; 9.7; 11.5;
14.1; 14.5 and 19.0 millions. In the fifty years ending 1850 the
population increased 48.6 millions; in the fifty years ending 1900,
68.7 millions.

[4] Not all foreign investment of capital results or is intended to
result in stimulating agriculture and other extractive industries.
Much of it is spent unproductively on guns, ships and royal and
presidential luxuries, and much in stimulating manufacturing in
agricultural nations, thus narrowing instead of widening the
agricultural base of the capital-exporting countries.

[5] See Hobson, "Export of Capital."

[6] Moreover this investment, until the outbreak of the war, was
rapidly increasing, amounting to no less than $1,500,000,000 a year.

{85}

CHAPTER VII

THE ROOT OF IMPERIALISM

"The free West Indian negro," writes Sir Sidney Olivier, "is not only
averse as a matter of dignity to conducting himself as if he were a
plantation slave, and bound to work every day, but also enjoys the fun
of feeling himself a master. And so, on a big sugar estate, when
expensive machinery is running, and the crop has to be worked without
stoppage, or on a banana plantation, when the steamer has been
telephoned at daybreak, and two or three thousand bunches have to be at
the wharf by noon, the negro hands will very likely find it impossible
to cut canes or fruit that morning. It isn't a strike for better
conditions of labour; they may have no grievance; another day they will
turn up all right: but a big concern cannot be run on that basis. That
is the root of the demand for indentured labour in the West Indies."[1]

It is also the root of imperialism. For imperialism from an economic
point of view is in the main a foreign political control to make the
"niggers" work. The industrial nations, desiring food, raw materials,
markets and a field for investment, being thwarted by conditions in
certain backward agricultural countries, seek to remedy these
conditions by means of political sovereignty. It is not necessary to
control well-governed countries which are peopled by economically
ambitious men who will work six {86} days a week, fifty-two weeks in a
year. In politically independent countries, however, and especially in
the tropics, production is rendered ineffective by the disturbed
political conditions, the lack of capi