The special commission for the government of this African State must, naturally, be chosen with great care and thought.  It must represent, not simply governments, but civilization, science, commerce, social reform, religious philanthropy without sectarian propaganda.  It must include, not simply white men, but educated and trained men of Negro blood.  The guiding principles before such a commission should be clearly understood.  In the first place, it ought by this time to be realized by the labor movement throughout the world that no industrial democracy can be built on industrial despotism, whether the two systems are in the same country or in different countries, since the world today so nearly approaches a common industrial unity.  If, therefore, it is impossible in any single land to uplift permanently skilled labor without also raising common labor, so, too, there can be no permanent uplift of American or European labor as long as African laborers are slaves.

Secondly, this building of a new African State does not mean the segregation in it of all the world’s black folk.  It is too late in the history of the world to go back to the idea of absolute racial segregation.  The new African State would not involve any idea of a vast transplantation of the twenty-seven million Negroids of the western world, of Africa, or of the gathering there of Negroid Asia.  The Negroes in the United States and the other Americas have earned the right to fight out their problems where they are, but they could easily furnish from time to time technical experts, leaders of thought, and missionaries of culture for their backward brethren in the new Africa.

With these two principles, the practical policies to be followed out in the government of the new states should involve a thorough and complete system of modern education, built upon the present government, religion, and customary laws of the natives.  There should be no violent tampering with the curiously efficient African institutions of local self-government through the family and the tribe; there should be no attempt at sudden “conversion” by religious propaganda.  Obviously deleterious customs and unsanitary usages must gradually be abolished, but the general government, set up from without, must follow the example of the best colonial administrators and build on recognized, established foundations rather than from entirely new and theoretical plans.

The real effort to modernize Africa should be through schools rather than churches.  Within ten years, twenty million black children ought to be in school.  Within a generation young Africa should know the essential outlines of modern culture and groups of bright African students could be going to the world’s great universities.  From the beginning the actual general government should use both colored and white officials and later natives should be worked in.  Taxation and industry could follow the newer ideals of industrial democracy, avoiding private land monopoly and poverty, and promoting co-operation in production and the socialization of income.  Difficulties as to capital and revenue would be far less than many imagine.  If a capable English administrator of British Nigeria could with $1,500 build up a cocoa industry of twenty million dollars annually, what might not be done in all Africa, without gin, thieves, and hypocrisy?