world over realized that it was nothing less than suicide on the part of the white race.  After the close of the war many books dealing with the issues at stake were written, and in the year 1920 alone several of these appeared in the United States.  Of all of these publications, because of their different points of view, four might call for special consideration—­The Republic of Liberia, by R.C.F.  Maugham; The Rising Tide of Color, by Lothrop Stoddard; Darkwater, by W.E.  Burghardt DuBois, and Empire and Commerce in Africa:  A Study in Economic Imperialism, by Leonard Woolf.  The position of each of these books is clear and all bear directly upon the central theme.

The Republic of Liberia was written by one who some years ago was the English consul at Monrovia and who afterwards was appointed to Dakar.  The supplementary preface also gives the information that the book was really written two years before it appeared, publication being delayed on account of the difficulties of printing at the time.  Even up to 1918, however, the account is incomplete, and the failure to touch upon recent developments becomes serious; but it is of course impossible to record the history of Liberia from 1847 to the present and reflect credit upon England.  There are some pages of value in the book, especially those in which the author speaks of the labor situation in the little African republic; but these are obviously intended primarily for consumption by business men in London.  “Liberians,” we are informed, “tell you that, whatever may be said to the contrary, the republic’s most uncomfortable neighbor has always been France.”  This is hardly true.  France has indeed on more than one occasion tried to equal her great rival in aggrandizement, but she has never quite succeeded in so doing.  As we have already shown in connection with Liberia in the present work, from the very first the shadow of Great Britain fell across the country.  In more recent years, by loans that were no more than clever plans for thievery, by the forceful occupation of large tracts of land, and by interference in the internal affairs of the country, England has again and again proved herself the arch-enemy of the republic.  The book so recently written in the last analysis appears to be little more than the basis of effort toward still further exploitation.

The very merit of The Rising Tide of Color depends on its bias, and it is significant that the book closes with a quotation from Kipling’s “The Heritage.”  To Dr. Stoddard the most disquieting feature of the recent situation was not the war but the peace.  Says he, “The white world’s inability to frame a constructive settlement, the perpetuation of intestine hatreds and the menace of fresh civil wars complicated by the specter of social revolution, evoke the dread thought that the late war may be merely the first stage in a cycle of ruin.”  As for the war itself, “As colored men realized