The incompetence of Portugal
cannot endure. Now that England has taken the Transvaal from the
Boer, she will find the seaport of Lorenco Marquez too necessary to
her interests to much longer leave it in the itching palms of the
Portuguese officials. Beira she also needs to feed Rhodesia, and the
Zambesi and Chinde Rivers to supply the British Central African
Company. Farther north, the Germans will find that if they mean to
make German Central Africa pay, they must control the seaboard. It
seems inevitable that, between the two great empires, the little
kingdom of Portugal will be crowded out, and having failed to
benefit either herself or anyone else on the East Coast, she will
withdraw from it, in favor of those who are fitter to survive her.
There is no more interesting contrast along the coast of East
Africa than that presented by the colonies of England, Germany, and
Portugal. Of these three, the colonies of the Englishmen are, as one
expects to find them, the healthiest, the busiest, and the most
prosperous. They thrive under your very eyes; you feel that they
were established where they are, not by accident, not to gratify a
national vanity or a ruler's ambition, but with foresight and with
knowledge, and with the determination to make money; and that they
will increase and flourish because they are situated where the
natives and settlers have something to sell, and where the men can
bring, in return, something the natives and colonials wish to buy.
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