THE WORLD'S COLONIES AND THEIR POPULATIONS.
THE colonies of the world are inhabited by about 500,000,000. Of these only three small groups, numbering less than three per cent of the whole, are composed in any considerable degree of the people of the governing country or their descendants. The principal of this small proportion of 15,000,000 are the English colonies, British North America, Australia, and South Africa. The vast remainder of 485,000,000 people are governed by countries not contiguous to them and are different stock from that of the governing country. All the governing countries are located in the temperate zone, and all of the governed territory as colonies, with the exception of Canada, southern Australasia, and New Zealand, is tropical or subtropical. The governed countries are divided into three groups, the East Indian, West Indian, and African. The East Indian, or oriental group, includes the British colonies of India, Ceylon, the Malayan Peninsula, Fiji, and Borneo; the Dutch colonies, of Java and Sumatra, and the French colony, of Indo-China. These are all comparatively near the Philippines. The second group is the West Indian. Here are colonies governed by the British, French, Dutch, and Danish governments. The third group includes Africa and the neighboring islands. Therein are territories governed by Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Belgium. Three hundred and fifty million of these are in the British colonies; 56,000,000 in the French, 35,000,000 in the Dutch, 30,000,000 in the Belgian, 15,000,000 in German, 9,000,000 in Portuguese, and only 135,000 in the Spanish colonies. The United States now has a population of about 10,000,000, including the Philippines, Porto Rico, and the Sandwich Islands. These facts are taken from a monograph just issued by the Territorial Bureau of Statistics covering 1890 to 1900 inclusive.