This partition of Africa brought revision of the ideas of Negro uplift.  Why was it necessary, the European investors argued, to push a continent of black workers along the paths of social uplift by education, trades-unionism, property holding, and the electoral franchise when the workers desired no change, and the rate of European profit would suffer?

There quickly arose then the second suggestion for settling the Negro problem.  It called for the virtual enslavement of natives in certain industries, as rubber and ivory collecting in the Belgian Congo, cocoa raising in Portuguese Angola, and diamond mining in South Africa.  This new slavery or “forced” labor was stoutly defended as a necessary foundation for implanting modern industry in a barbarous land; but its likeness to slavery was too clear and it has been modified, but not wholly abolished.

The third attempted solution of the Negro sought the result of the second by less direct methods.  Negroes in Africa, the West Indies, and America were to be forced to work by land monopoly, taxation, and little or no education.  In this way a docile industrial class working for low wages, and not intelligent enough to unite in labor unions, was to be developed.  The peonage systems in parts of the United States and the labor systems of many of the African colonies of Great Britain and Germany illustrate this phase of solution.[111] It is also illustrated in many of the West Indian islands where we have a predominant Negro population, and this population freed from slavery and partially enfranchised.  Land and capital, however, have for the most part been so managed and monopolized that the black peasantry have been reduced to straits to earn a living in one of the richest parts of the world.  The problem is now going to be intensified when the world’s commerce begins to sweep through the Panama Canal.

All these solutions and methods, however, run directly counter to modern philanthropy, and have to be carried on with a certain concealment and half-hypocrisy which is not only distasteful in itself, but always liable to be discovered and exposed by some liberal or religious movement of the masses of men and suddenly overthrown.  These solutions are, therefore, gradually merging into a fourth solution, which is to-day very popular.  This solution says:  Negroes differ from whites in their inherent genius and stage of development.  Their development must not, therefore, be sought along European lines, but along their own native lines.  Consequently the effort is made to-day in British Nigeria, in the French Congo and Sudan, in Uganda and Rhodesia to leave so far as possible the outward structure of native life intact; the king or chief reigns, the popular assemblies meet and act, the native courts adjudicate, and native social and family life and religion prevail.  All this, however, is subject to the veto and command of a European magistracy