As a preliminary to our discussion let us remark two men by way of contrast.  A little more than seventy years ago a great traveler set out upon the first of three long journeys through central and southern Africa.  He was a renowned explorer, and yet to him “the end of the geographical feat was only the beginning of the enterprise.”  Said Henry Drummond of him:  “Wherever David Livingstone’s footsteps are crossed in Africa the fragrance of his memory seems to remain.”  On one occasion a hunter was impaled on the horn of a rhinoceros, and a messenger ran eight miles for the physician.  Although he himself had been wounded for life by a lion and his friends said that he should not ride at night through a wood infested with beasts, Livingstone insisted on his Christian duty to go, only to find that the man had died and to be obliged to retrace his footsteps.  Again and again his party would have been destroyed if it had not been for his own unbounded tact and courage, and after his death at Chitambo’s village Susi and Chuma journeyed for nine months and over eight hundred miles to take his body to the coast.  “We work for a glorious future,” said he, “which we are not destined to see—­the golden age which has not been, but will yet be.  We are only morning-stars shining in the dark, but the glorious morn will break, the good time coming yet.  For this time we work; may God accept our imperfect service.”

About the time that Livingstone was passing off the scene another strong man, one of England’s “empire builders,” began his famous career.  Going first to South Africa as a young man in quest of health, Cecil Rhodes soon made a huge fortune out of Kimberley diamonds and Transvaal gold, and by 1890 had become the Prime Minister of Cape Colony.  In the pursuit of his aims he was absolutely unscrupulous.  He refused to recognize any rights of the Portuguese in Matabeleland and Mashonaland; he drove hard bargains with the Germans and the French; he defied the Boers; and to him the native Africans were simply so many tools for the heaping up of gold.  Nobody ever said of him that he left a “fragrant memory” behind him; but thousands of bruised bodies and broken hearts bore witness to his policy.  According to the ideals of modern England, however, he was a great man.  What the Negro in the last analysis wonders is:  Who was right, Livingstone or Rhodes?  And which is the world to choose, Christ or Mammon?

There are two fundamental assumptions upon which all so-called Western civilization is based—­that of racial and that of religious superiority.  Sight has been lost of the fact that there is really no such thing as a superior race, that only individuals are superior one to another, and a popular English poet has sung of “the white man’s burden” and of “lesser breeds without the law.”  These two assumptions have accounted for all of the misunderstanding that has arisen between the West and the East, for China and Japan, India and Egypt can