We see Europe’s greatest sin precisely where we found Africa’s and Asia’s,—­in human hatred, the despising of men; with this difference, however:  Europe has the awful lesson of the past before her, has the splendid results of widened areas of tolerance, sympathy, and love among men, and she faces a greater, an infinitely greater, world of men than any preceding civilization ever faced.

It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time.  No nation is less fitted for this role.  For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,—­making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,—­rather a great religion, a world war-cry:  Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts!

Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned.  And this, too, in spite of the fact that there has been no actual failure; the Indian is not dying out, the Japanese and Chinese have not menaced the land, and the experiment of Negro suffrage has resulted in the uplift of twelve million people at a rate probably unparalleled in history.  But what of this?  America, Land of Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker peoples were concerned.  Absolutely without excuse she established a caste system, rushed into preparation for war, and conquered tropical colonies.  She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe in Europe’s worst sin against civilization.  She aspires to sit among the great nations who arbitrate the fate of “lesser breeds without the law” and she is at times heartily ashamed even of the large number of “new” white people whom her democracy has admitted to place and power.  Against this surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and “dago” her social bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does take her unflinching and immovable stand, backed by this new public policy of Europe.  She trains her immigrants to this despising of “niggers” from the day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to the submerged classes in the fatherlands.

* * * * *

All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder of the seven seas.  From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars.  Eastward and westward storms are breaking,—­great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty.  I will not believe them inevitable.  I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.