From British West Africa comes the bitter complaint “that the West Africans should have the right or opportunity to settle their future for themselves is a thing which hardly enters the mind 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 they are Europeans, but no extra-European is credited, even by the extremist advocates of human equality, with any right except to humbly accept the fate which Europe shall decide for him.”

Here, then, is the danger and the demand; and the real Pacifist will seek to organize, not simply the masses in white nations, guarding against exploitation and profiteering, but will remember 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, must come as uplift and prevention and not merely as alleviation and religious conversion.  Reverence for humanity, as such, must be installed in the world, and Africa should be the talisman.

Black Africa, including British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish possessions and the independent states of Abyssinia and Liberia and leaving out of account Egypt and North Africa, on the one hand, and South Africa, on the other, has an area of 8,200,000 square miles and a population well over one hundred millions of black men, with less than one hundred thousand whites.

Commercial exploitation in Africa has already larger results to show than most people realize.  Annually $200,000,000 worth of goods was coming out of black Africa before the World 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 there was being returned to Africa one hundred millions in cotton cloth, twenty-five millions in iron and steel, and as much in foods, and probably twenty-five millions in liquors.

Here are the beginnings of a modern industrial system:  iron and steel for permanent investment, bound to yield large dividends; cloth as the cheapest exchange for invaluable raw material; liquor to tickle the appetites of the natives and 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 expansion:  cotton may yet challenge the southern United States, fruits and vegetables, hides and skins, lumber and dye-stuffs, coffee and tea, grain and tobacco, and fibers of all sorts can easily follow organized and systematic toil.

Is it a paradise of industry we thus contemplate?  It is much more likely to be a hell.  Under present plans there will be no voice or law or custom to protect labor, no trades unions, no eight-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 deviltry, which civilization has been driving to the slums and the backwaters, will have a voiceless continent to conceal it.  If the slave cannot be taken from Africa, slavery can be taken to Africa.