The fact
is, tropical trade has opened out so rapidly and so wonderfully that
nobody knows much about the chief articles of tropical growth; we go on
using them in an uninquiring spirit of childlike faith, much as the
Jamaica negroes go on using articles of European manufacture about whose
origin they are so ridiculously ignorant that one young woman once asked
me whether it was really true that cotton handkerchiefs were dug up out
of the ground over in England. Some dim confusion between coal or iron
and Manchester piece-goods seemed to have taken firm possession of her
infantile imagination.
That is why I have thought that a treatise De Banana might not, perhaps,
be wholly without its usefulness to the modern English reading world.
After all, a food-stuff which supports hundreds of millions among our
beloved tropical fellow-creatures ought to be very dear to the heart of
a nation which governs (and annually kills) more black people, taken in
the mass, than all the other European powers put together. We have
introduced the blessings of British rule--the good and well-paid
missionary, the Remington rifle, the red-cotton pocket-handkerchief, and
the use of 'the liquor called rum'--into so many remote corners of the
tropical world that it is high time we should begin in return to learn
somewhat about fetiches and fustic, Jamaica and jaggery, bananas and
Buddhism. We know too little still about our colonies and dependencies.
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