e the great natural resources at its disposal
and to arm millions of black soldiers for aggression. A mere elimination
of Germany from Africa will not solve that difficulty. What we have to
eliminate is not this nation or that, but the system of national shoving
and elbowing, the treatment of Africa as the board for a game of
beggar-my-neighbour-and-damn-the-niggers, in which a few syndicates,
masquerading as national interests, snatch a profit to the infinite loss
of all mankind. We want a lowering of barriers and a unification of
interests, we want an international control of these disputed regions,
to override nationalist exploitation. The whole world wants it. It is a
chastened and reasonable world we live in to-day, and the time for white
reason and the wide treatment of these problems is now.

Finally, the time is drawing near when the Egyptian and the nations of
India will ask us, "Are things going on for ever here as they go on now,
or are we to look for the time when we, too, like the Africander, the
Canadian and the Australian, will be your confessed and equal partners?"
Would it not be wise to answer that question in the affirmative before
the voice in which it is asked grows thick with anger? In Egypt, for
example, we are either robbers very like--except for a certain
difference in touch--the Germans in Belgium, or we are honourable
trustees. It is our claim and pride to be honourable trustees. Nothing
so becomes a trustee as a cheerful openness of disposition. Great
Britain has to table her world policy. It is a thing overdue. No doubt
we have already a literature of liberal imperialism and a considerable
accumulation of declarations by this statesman or that. But what is
needed is a formulation much more representative, official and permanent
than that, something that can be put beside President Wilson's clear
rendering of the American idea. We want all our peoples to understand,
and we want all mankind to understand that our Empire is not a net about
the world in which the progress of mankind is entangled, but a
self-conscious political system working side by side with the other
democracies of the earth, preparing the way for, and prepared at last to
sacrifice and merge itself in, the world confederation of free and equal
peoples.

Sec. 2

This letter was presently followed up by an article in the _Daily News_,
entitled "A Reasonable Man's Peace." This article provoked a
considerable controversy