Darkwater

who would write world history and leave out of account this most marvelous of continents. Particularly today most men ass

rotecting civilizations, which grew so mightily that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out of its darker and more remote forest fastne

ce to Great Britain. As Mommsen says: "It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world." In Africa the last flood of Germanic invas

rn thought Africa came no less suddenly with her n

he world and w

Africa and

ght had sent the world's greed scurrying down the hot, mysterious coasts of Africa to the Good Hope of gain, until fo

, seeping, seething, foaming to burst through, ever and again overwhelming the emerging masses of white men in its roll

on human beings, transformed the face of her social life, overthrew organized government, distorted ancient industry, and snuffed out the lights of cultural development. Today instead of removing l

hundred and fifty million acres of the best of natives' land to a million and a half whites and leaves thirty-six million acres of swamp and marsh for four and a h

ts, having increased fifty per cent. in ten years and reaching a total of at least twenty-five million dollars a year today. Negroes of ability have been carefully gotten rid of, d

education and industry. Yet the balance of iniquity is desperately large; but worse than that, it has aroused no world protest. A great Englishman, f

nglish national debt after the war! German thinkers, knowing the tremendous demand for raw material which would follow the war, had similar plans of exploitation. "It is the clear, common sense of the African situation," says H.G. Wells, "that while these precious regions

dustrial democracy and for the organization of Europe so as to avoid incentives to war,-we, least of all, should be willing to leave the backward world as the greatest temptation

tially upon the same policies as in the past, then there is but one thing for the trained man of darker blood to do and that is definitely and as openly as possible to organize his world for war against Europe. He may have to do it by secret, underground propaganda, as in Egypt and India and eventually in the United States; or by open increase of armament, as in Japan; or by desperate efforts at modernization, as in China; but he must do it. He represents th

aims to parts of black Africa on the wishes and interests of the black inhabitants. Lloyd George has declared "the general principle of national self-determi

Colored America demands that "the conquered German colonies should not be returned to Germany, neither should they be held by the Allies. Here is the opportunity

nationhood of Poland, about giving satisfaction to the separatist feeling in Ireland, and about what is to be do

we fail to embrace this opportunity now, we fail to see how we will be ever able to solve the race question. It is for the British Negro, the

d of the European politician. That the Balkan States should be admitted to the Council of Peace and decide the government under which they are to live is taken as a matter of course because

emember that no permanent relief can come but by including in this organization the lowest and the most exploited races in the world. World philanthropy, like national philanthropy, mus

inia and Liberia and leaving out of account Egypt and North Africa, on the one hand, and South Africa, on the other, has an area o

d War, including a third of the world's supply of rubber, a quarter of all of the world's cocoa, and practically all of the world's cloves, gum-arabic, and palm-oil. In exchange

nd render the alienation of land and the breakdown of customary law easier; eventually forced and contract labor under white drivers to increase and systematize the production of raw materials. These materials are capable of indefinite

hour laws, no factory legislation,-nothing of that great body of legislation built up in modern days to protect mankind from sinking to the level of beasts of burden. All the industrial devilt

culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu. Kingdoms and empires flourished in Songhay and Zymbabwe, and art and industry in Yoruba and Benin. They have fought every human calamity in its most hideous form and yet tod

, with a more or less regular attendance of three-quarters of a million school children. In a few cases training of a higher order is given chiefs' sons and selected pupils. These

te and color serfdom. Out of this dangerous nadir of development stretch two paths: one is indicated by the condition of about three per cent of the people who in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and French Senegal, are tending toward the path of modern development; the other path, followed by a fourth of the land and people, has local self-government and nativ

ndent Africa, the industrial slavery of the mass of the blacks and the encoura

eignty under which it does not wish to live"; recognizing in President Wilson's message to the Russians, the "principle of the undictated development of all peoples"; recognizing the resolution of the recent conference of the Aborigines Protection Society of England, "that in any reconstruction of Africa, which may result from this wa

ther Portugal nor Belgium has shown any particular capacity for governing colonial peoples. Valid excuses may in both cases be advanced, but it would certainly be fair to Belgium to have her start her great task of reorganization after the World War with neither the burden nor the temptation of colonies; and in the same way Portugal has, in reality, the alternative of

ste and a suppressed horde of serfs? Will it not be possible to rebuild a world with compact nations, emp

at once or, if unfitted for that, be put under international tutelage and guardianship. It is possible that France, with her great heart, may welcome a Black France,-an enlarged Senegal in Africa; but it would seem that eventually all Africa south of twenty degrees north

unspeakable become so common as to cease to stir us; in a day when Russia has dethroned her Czar, England has granted the suffrage to women and is in the act of giving Home Rule to Ireland; when Germany has adopted parliament

an conceive of no better way of governing this state than through that same international control by which we hope to govern the world for peace. A curious and instructive parallel has been drawn by Simeon Strunsky: "Just as the common ownership of

or the profit of the capitalists, or should be used for the promotion of the militarists' aims of government. In view of the fact that it is impracticable here to leave the various peoples concerned to settle their own destinies it is suggested that the interests of humanity would be best se

have primary regard to the wishes and interests of the native inhabitants of such colonies. None of those territories is inhabited by Europeans. The governing considerations, therefore, must be that the inhab

rained men of Negro blood. The guiding principles before such a commission should be clearly understood. In the first place, it ought by this time to be realized by the labor movement throughout the world that no industrial democracy can be built on industrial despotism, whether the two systems are in the same country or in

State would not involve any idea of a vast transplantation of the twenty-seven million Negroids of the western world, of Africa, or of the gathering there of Negroid Asia. The Negroes in the United States and the other America

ere should be no violent tampering with the curiously efficient African institutions of local self-government through the family and the tribe; there should be no attempt at sudden "conversion" by religious propaganda. Obviously deleterious customs and u

t universities. From the beginning the actual general government should use both colored and white officials and later natives should be worked in. Taxation and industry could follow the newer ideals of industrial democracy, avoiding private land monopoly and poverty, and promoting co-operation in production and

ge: no return so fabulous would be offered that civilized lands would be tempted to divert to colonial trade and invest materia

its possibility. By reason of a crime (perhaps the greatest crime in human history) the modern world has been systematically taught to despise colored peoples. Men of education and decency ask, and ask seriously, if it is really p

sciously trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk are sub-human. This belief is not based on science, else it would be held as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to be withdrawn in the face of facts; the belief is not based on history, for it is absolutely contradicted by Egyptian, Greek, Roma

pt of Negroes rests upon no scientific foundation worth a moment's attention. It is nothing more than a vicious habit of mind. It could as easily be overthrown as our belief in war, as our international hatreds, as our old conception of the status o

ypt should be free and independent, there along the highway to a free and independent India; while Morocco, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli must become a part of Europe, with

rather are they hands of pain and promise; hard, gnarled, and muscled for the world's real work; they are hands of

ptian history," rose to the throne of the Pharaohs and redeemed the world and her people. Twenty centuries after Christ, Black Africa,-prostrated, raped, and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe. Beyond the awful sea a black woman is weeping

ss of the

r as the laughing of a child. She sat in the Hither Isles, well walled between the This and Now, upon a low and silver throne, and leaned upon its armposts, sadly looking upward toward the sun. Now

lime her soul sat silver-throned, staring toward the great hill to the westw

down along the restless waters and sat beside the armpost of her throne, she wondered why she could not love him and fly with him up the shining mountain's side, out of the dirt and dust that nested between the This and Now. She looked at him and tried to be glad, for he was bonny and good to look upon, this king of Yonder Kingdo

ore gold in Yo

r gold!" blurte

e," he mainta

belongs," she said, "to

e glanced to where Yonder Kingdom blushed above the sea

red in living flame, and its crown was one vast jewel, glistening in glittering glory that made the sun's own face a blackness,-the blackness of utter light. With blinded, tear-filled eyes she peered i

y backward and lighting in his lips a carefully rolled wisp of fragrant t

slime. He was little and bald and black, rough-clothed, sodden with dirt, a

omfortably beside the silver throne and l

ked and shrank on her throne. He, the beggar man, was-was what? But his retinue,-that squalid, sordid, parti-colored band of vacant, dull-faced filth and viciousness-was writhing over the la

throng. She watched it with fascinated eyes,-how it rose and sailed and whirled and struggled in the air, then seemed to burst, and upward flew its light and sheen and downward dropped

e the same soft, glad gleam of utter understanding, seen so many times before. She saw the suffering of endless years and endless love that softened it. She saw the burning passion of the sun and with it the cold, unbending duty-deeds of upper a

ing of Yonder Kingd

old?" And then in sudden generosity, he added: "Yo

on with radiant face, an

en a lone, black hound that nosed and whimpered as he ran, and then a space; and then the king of Yonder Kingdom in hi

ack past death and pain toward the maid and ever the maid strove forward with lovelit eyes, but ever the great

and gray and rusted-while the princess strained her pitiful eyes aloft to where the beggar, set 'twixt Death and Pain, whirled his slim back against the glory of the

ared the white flowers of her breast and snatching forth her own red heart held it wi

uickly, curiously, still fingering the ear

e growled darkly;

man qu

ed fiercely. "It's neither

ess stepp

oked north and east; he raised hi

princess sang, and s

gdom, "for such were blasphemy and de

armless and disbodied up through the sunlit air. Down hissed the blow and it clove the whimpering hound until his last shriek shook the stars. Down his

ws cold and dark, gloomed the Hither Isles and the hill that once was golden, but now was green and slimy dross; all be

others know and murdered loves. Poised on the crumbling edge of that great nothingness the princess

ows groped the king, thunde

illed the still and throbbing warmt

prince