Daily inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1881-1901, 1899-03-29
WHITES AND THE TROPICS.

complishment, the United States will be
in undisputed possession of the Philip
pines in the not distant future. The fact
that the islands are prolific in natural
resources and Astounding in magnificent
the enterprising and adventurous Anglo
SaXons to them, the almost omnipresent
tand irrepressible American being in the
Lead. The question:: Can tropical lands
be successfully colonized by white men,
1will then become a pertinent one.
y, 1t is held by many that tropical climates
ARE insalubrious, that if white men es-
Ieape the diseases incidental to them they
become ~enervated M canno work we'll,
and that contact with the natives in
those lands is demoralizing, the white
man not only losing his physical but his
inertia vigor. If this were so, one MAY
we'll hesitate to trust himself to the sur
~roundings of the F%ilipinos. But there
are eminent naturalists II explorers
whose experiences in the tropics negative
the assumption. Among them is Dr.. AL
fred Russell Wallace, who has lived and
worked a dozen years on or within ten
degrees of the equator. The gist of his
experiences and observations during four
Amazon valley, and eight years among
the islands of the Malay archipelago,
away from which many are now warning
the American people, way thus be briefly
summarized:
DR.. Wallace says, neither yellow fever
nor plague is due to the tropical climate.
yellow fever was created by the
trade and propagated by the neg
lect Of sanitation. The plague is due to
overcrowding and lack of sanitation. In
the east there were no such slave ships as
here, and there is no yellow fever. The
plague once prevailed in London as vio-
lently as ever in Hong Kong or Bombay.
sanitation expelled it. Again,
Wallace says that malarial or jungle
fevers are not, in any sense, due to the
climate. His experience shows him that
equatorial swamps are quite healthy as
long as they are in a state of nature. 1t
is only when they are cleared and culti-
waited that they become unhealthW. Two
centuries 6 these fevers prevailed
England. Drainage and i'm
proved sanitary conditions conquered
them. He scouts as a vulgar error the
assertion that the vast luxuriance of
Vegetation in tropical regions is inimical
to human life or human labor.
The doctor says, sit is not the fact
that white men cannot permanently live
and work in the tropics" On the con-
trary, work there is a cOndltlOn OF
healthy life, as it is elsewhere. He found
it so, and so did Englishmen, officers,
planters, doctors, and many others, in
Guiding East India Germans, who lived
in tropical climates for many years. He
cries the case of Queensland. That is an
intensely tropical region. Yet white men
live there and work there, and they work
hard, too, as gold miners, sheep shearers,
sugar makers, railroad builders, and con-
duct all the laborious enterprises of civil
led communities. And their health re-
mains good.
that tropical climates are not hostile to
health or to exertion. Diseases prevail
there only through conditions which
would produce them elsewhere. The
same care in diet, clothing, sanitation,
etc, that preserves health in other locali-
ties will preserve health in the tropics.
White men can permanentlylive and work
efficiently in the tropics. That they are
not able to do so is a myth. Of the great
belt 1000 miles wide, extending from IL
to Is degrees On each side of the equator,
"by far the larger part is vol only we'll
adanted for permanent OccupatiOn nv
white men, but is also, with proper SAN
itary precautions, the most healthy and