Economic movement may be divided into five great categories, namely,
movement by air, by water, by rail, by road and by pack. Each may be
divided into two sub-categories. Thus, air movement by transport lighter
and heavier than air; water movement into sea transport and inland water
transport; railway movement into broad and narrow-gauge lines; road
movement into transport by wagon and lorry, and pack movement into human
and animal porterage or carriage.
I do not here intend to examine movement by air and water, and, as
regards the other three categories, I will limit my examination to their
use in undeveloped countries, more particularly within the Empire, and I
will start with the railway.
_The Railway._ The country through which a railway is built may be
divided into three economic areas:—
(i) A belt about eighty miles in width, through the centre of which the
railway runs.
(ii) Two belts, each about twenty miles wide, extending on the flanks of
the central belt.
(iii) The whole of the country concerned, excluding the above three
belts.
Whether the prosperity of the country is based on minerals, cattle, or
cereals, the first belt is normally prosperous, the second two less
prosperous, and the remainder of the country unremunerative. To bring
the whole country up to the prosperity of the first belt demands a
railway every eighty miles.
Obviously, in an undeveloped country, to build railways every eighty
miles is prohibitively costly, but as nearly every nation in the world
is prepared to spend millions of pounds on the construction and
maintenance of railways and rolling stock, and often with little
reference to the law of supply and demand, it is advisable, I think,
briefly to examine the question of cost.
The cost of a railway decreases as the load increases; the load must,
consequently, be sufficient to pay for the capital expenditure entailed
in constructing the line and also its maintenance. The cost of the
Nigerian railways was £11,000 per open mile; the estimated cost of new
construction in the Gold Coast lies between £13,000 and £17,000 per
mile. For railways costing as much as these, and the figures are not
abnormally high, to pay, the country they traverse must not only be
fertile or rich in minerals, but thickly inhabited.
I have already examined the question of population in the Dominions, all
of which are to-day sparsely inhabited, so I will now turn to another
area, namely, British Tropical Africa, a potentially immensely rich
country covering some two and a half million square miles and occupied
by forty million inhabitants. To run railways through this country would
be similar to running railways through Great Britain less its present
elaborate system of roads[5] and with a population numbering about two
and a quarter millions. In such conditions railways would most certainly
not pay, and would only begin to do so when road feeders had been built
and the country had become thickly populated.
Footnote 5:
There are 178,000 miles of road in Great Britain.
_The Road_. As economically the railway is length with little breadth,
in undeveloped countries it can only be looked upon as an artery,
depending for its freight on the roads and tracks which converge on it.
If these roads and tracks be few in number, generally speaking, freights
will be insignificant, and the railway, in place of fostering wealth,
will swallow it up or stifle it. The railway must, therefore, be skirted
by a network of roads.
The cheapest form of road is a rough cart track, and where the country
consists of grass land and the rainfall is low, as in South Africa,
extensive use can be made of bullock wagons for purposes of
transportation. The bullock wagon has reached, however, the zenith of
its evolution, and is by no means suited for countries where grazing is
difficult. If fodder has to be carried in bulk, it at once becomes an
uneconomical means of movement.
If the country to be traversed is unsuited to this means of transport,
we are left with the lorry, and though light box-cars, such as Ford
vans, can use rough tracks and frequently move across country, the load
carried is so small, that, unless it is of a particularly valuable
nature, or distance is short, the cost of carriage becomes prohibitive.
We are left, therefore, with the heavy lorry, varying from three to six
tons burden.
These vehicles obviously demand macadamized roads, which not only are
extremely expensive to build, but in a sparsely inhabited country
prohibitively expensive to maintain. Here in England, we spend yearly
£50,000,000 and more on road repair.[6] In Jamaica, £1,000,000 is spent
on the maintenance of lorry roads. In both countries this means that
each inhabitant has to pay slightly more than £1 a year to meet the road
repair bill. In tropical countries, where torrential rains fall and
vegetation luxuriates, the macadamized road is out of the question, so
also is it in desert land where the sand is apt to silt over the
roadways.
Footnote 6:
In 1914–1915 the maintenance of roads cost £19,000,000, in 1921–1922
this sum had risen to £45,500,000.
If the road will not suit the vehicle, the vehicle must be made to suit
the road. Here again the difficulty is economically almost insuperable.
Balloon tyres, the use of light trailers and of multi-wheel vehicles
will partially overcome the difficulty; but rubber rapidly deteriorates
in tropical countries, and though a vehicle, such as the Renault six
twin-wheel car, has carried out some wonderful performances in the
Sahara and elsewhere, the maintenance of twelve balloon tyres
practically rules it out of court in most undeveloped countries.
If the bullock wagon is restricted to certain areas, and if the lorry
demands a road which is prohibitively expensive, the only remaining
sources of transport which can feed the railway are the pack animal and
the human porter.
_The Pack Animal._ In examining this last system of transport, I will
begin with the human pack-animal, the native porter. Not only is this
means of carriage the most primitive of all, which renders it somewhat
of an anachronism in the twentieth century, but it is extravagant in the
extreme. Economically it is unsound, since the human pack-animal stands
in the way of the development of his country. In the first place his
productive work is lost, and in the second, the load carried is so small
as to offer little encouragement to the producer. Last, and by no means
least, unlike the railway, as the amount increases, so does the cost per
ton mile increase with it.
On a large scale the system is impossible, and the substitution of pack
animals for porters is but little less uneconomical, except in
mountainous countries and desert lands, and in the latter, it would seem
that the reign of the camel is approaching its end, since in most places
where a camel can go a car can follow.