THE GERMAN EMPIRE OF CENTRAL AFRICA
such a law as that, which can give a chance of peaceful development to our economic system and to the German element in the world. It allows the emigration of surplus forces to the cheap fields of supply overseas and attaches them to new German land, giving them a home on it. They are no longer compelled to wander round the world as commercial travellers and agents of German industries in search of a market. It should no longer be the aim of German economic policy to swell the figures of foreign trade by all sorts of petty artifices. We should rather arrive at establishing what are the needs of the population in the matter of tropical foodstuffs and luxuries, as well as of raw material for our industries, and arranging for the oversea production accordingly. What our own colonies cannot achieve ought to be handed over to friendly States under treaty. And we ought not to turn out as an equivalent much over the strictly necessary quantity of finished industrial products. It was by scraping together the tropical and subtropical agricultural products of all the world that we brought unrest into our economic system ; nothing but regulation and orçler and the greatest possible production of raw material by our own tropical agriculture will bring us peace in our labour, will free us from the fevered scramble of competition, and make the German a happy man again.
IV.— The Oversea Foundations of German World-Power.
The main anxiety of those who find it hard to reconcile themselves to the idea of a great Central-African colonial Empire is concerned with the Congo territories, and it is especially the sleeping sickness, so prevalent there, which is regarded as a heavy mortgage calculated to depreciate very materially the value of the colony.
The Rapports sur VAdministration du Congo belge again and again deplore the wide dissemination of sleeping sickness
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