It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader of the essential facts underlying these broad assertions.  A recent law of the Union of South Africa assigns nearly two 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 half-million blacks.  In Rhodesia over ninety million acres have been practically confiscated.  In the Belgian Congo all the land was declared the property of the state.

Slavery in all but name has been the foundation of the cocoa industry in St. Thome and St. Principe and in the mines of the Rand.  Gin has been one of the greatest of European imports, 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, deposed from authority, kept out of positions of influence, and discredited in their people’s eyes, while a caste of white overseers and governing officials has appeared everywhere.

Naturally, the picture is not all lurid.  David Livingstone has had his successors and Europe has given Africa something of value in the beginning of education and industry.  Yet the balance of iniquity is desperately large; but worse than that, it has aroused no world protest.  A great Englishman, familiar with African problems for a generation, says frankly today:  “There does not exist any real international conscience to which you can appeal.”

Moreover, that treatment shows no certain signs of abatement.  Today in England the Empire Resources Development Committee proposes to treat African colonies as “crown estates” and by intensive scientific exploitation of both land and labor to make these colonies pay the English 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 of raw material remain divided up between a number of competitive European imperialisms, each resolutely set upon the exploitation of its ‘possessions’ to its own advantage and the disadvantage of the others, there can be no permanent peace in the world.  It is impossible.”

We, then, who fought the war against war; who in a hell of blood and suffering held hardly our souls in leash by the vision of a world organized for peace; who are looking for industrial 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, not only to wars based on international jealousies, but to the most horrible of wars,—­which arise from the revolt of the maddened against those who hold them in common contempt.