rces available to
prevent the arms trade will be just another Hague Convention, just
another vague, well-intentioned, futile gesture.

And closely connected with this function of controlling the arms trade
is another great necessity of Africa under "tutelage," and that is the
necessity of a common collective agreement not to demoralize the native
population. That demoralization, physical and moral, has already gone
far. The whole negro population of Africa is now rotten with diseases
introduced by Arabs and Europeans during the last century, and such
African statesmen as Sir Harry Johnston are eloquent upon the necessity
of saving the blacks--and the baser whites--from the effects of trade
gin and similar alluring articles of commerce. Moreover, from Africa
there is always something new in the way of tropical diseases, and
presently Africa, if we let it continue to fester as it festers now, may
produce an epidemic that will stand exportation to a temperate climate.
A bacterium that may kill you or me in some novel and disgusting way may
even now be developing in some Congo muck-heap. So here is the need for
another Commission to look after the Health of Africa. That, too, should
be of authority over all the area of "tutelage" Africa. It is no good
stamping out infectious disease in Nyasaland while it is being bred in
Portuguese East Africa. And if there is a Disarmament Commission already
controlling the importation of arms, why should not that body also
control at the same time the importation of trade gin and similar
delicacies, and direct quarantine and such-like health regulations?

But there is another question in Africa upon which our "ignorant" Labour
class is far better informed than our dear old eighteenth-century upper
class which still squats so firmly in our Foreign and Colonial Offices,
and that is the question of forced labour. We cannot tolerate any
possibilities of the enslavement of black Africa. Long ago the United
States found out the impossibility of having slave labour working in the
same system with white. To cure that anomaly cost the United States a
long and bloody war. The slave-owner, the exploiter of the black,
becomes a threat and a nuisance to any white democracy. He brings back
his loot to corrupt Press and life at home. What happened in America in
the midst of the last century between Federals and Confederates must not
happen again on a larger scale between white Europe and middle Africa.