[David Gravereaux]

valuable minerals, and some of
them yield important vegetable products such as rubber which in colder
climates it is necessary to synthesize by comparatively expensive methods.
But above all they contain a bottomless reserve of cheap labour. Whichever
power controls equatorial Africa, or the countries of the Middle East, or
Southern India, or the Indonesian Archipelago, disposes also of the bodies
of scores or hundreds of millions of ill-paid and hard-working coolies. The
inhabitants of these areas, reduced more or less openly to the status of
slaves, pass continually from conqueror to conqueror, and are expended like
so much coal or oil in the race to turn out more armaments, to capture more
territory, to control more labour power, to turn out more armaments, to
capture more territory, and so on indefinitely. It should be noted that the
fighting never really moves beyond the edges of the disputed areas. The
frontiers of Eurasia flow back and forth between the basin of the Congo and
the northern shore of the Mediterranean; the islands of the Indian Ocean
and the Pacific are constantly being captured and recaptured by Oceania or
by Eastasia; in Mongolia the dividing line between Eurasia and Eastasia is
never stable; round the Pole all three powers lay claim to enormous
territories which in fact are largely unihabited and unexplored: but the
balance of power always remains roughly even, and the territory which forms
the heartland of each super-state always remains inviolate. Moreover, the
labour of the exploited peoples round the Equator is not really necessary
to the world's economy. They add nothing to the wealth of the world, since
whatever they produce is used for purposes of war, and the object of waging
a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war. By
their labour the slave populations allow the