supported by a native army with European officers.  The advantage of this method is that on its face it carries no clue to its real working.  Indeed it can always point to certain undoubted advantages:  the abolition of the slave trade, the suppression of war and feud, the encouragement of peaceful industry.  On the other hand, back of practically all these experiments stands the economic motive—­the determination to use the organization, the land, and the people, not for their own benefit, but for the benefit of white Europe.  For this reason education is seldom encouraged, modern religious ideas are carefully limited, sound political development is sternly frowned upon, and industry is degraded and changed to the demands of European markets.  The most ruthless class of white mercantile exploiters is allowed large liberty, if not a free hand, and protected by a concerted attempt to deify white men as such in the eyes of the native and in their own imagination.[112]

White missionary societies are spending perhaps as much as five million dollars a year in Africa and accomplishing much good, but at the same time white merchants are sending at least twenty million dollars’ worth of European liquor into Africa each year, and the debauchery of the almost unrestricted rum traffic goes far to neutralize missionary effort.

[Illustration:  Distribution of Negro Blood, Ancient and Modern]

Under this last mentioned solution of the Negro problems we may put the attempts at the segregation of Negroes and mulattoes in the United States and to some extent in the West Indies.  Ostensibly this is “separation” of the races in society, civil rights, etc.  In practice it is the subordination of colored people of all grades under white tutelage, and their separation as far as possible from contact with civilization in dwelling place, in education, and in public life.

On the other hand the economic significance of the Negro to-day is tremendous.  Black Africa to-day exports annually nearly two hundred million dollars’ worth of goods, and its economic development has scarcely begun.  The black West Indies export nearly one hundred million dollars’ worth of goods; to this must be added the labor value of Negroes in South Africa, Egypt, the West Indies, North, Central, and South America, where the result is blended in the common output of many races.  The economic foundation of the Negro problem can easily be seen to be a matter of many hundreds of millions to-day, and ready to rise to the billions tomorrow.

Such figures and facts give some slight idea of the economic meaning of the Negro to-day as a worker and industrial factor.  “Tropical Africa and its peoples are being brought more irrevocably every year into the vortex of the economic influences that sway the western world."[113]