s. They resemble the American Negro
more than any others in Africa. This parallel even goes to their
fondness for using big words. I saw hundreds of them holding down
important clerical positions in the Belgian Congo where they are known
as "Coast-men," because they come from the West Coast.

I had an amusing experience with one when I was on my way out of the
Congo jungle. I sent a message by him to the captain of the little
steamboat that took me up and down the Kasai River. In this message I
asked that the vessel be made ready for immediate departure. The
Coast-man, whose name was Wilson--they all have English names and speak
English fluently--came back and said:

"I have conveyed your expressed desire to leave immediately to the
captain of your boat. He only returns a verbal acquiescence but I assure
you that he will leave nothing undone to facilitate your speedy
departure."

He said all this with such a solemn and sober face that you would have
thought the whole destiny of the British Empire depended upon the
elaborateness of his utterance.

To return to the matter of unrest, all the concrete happenings that I
have related show that the authority of the white man in Africa is still
resented by the natives. It serves to emphasize what Mr. Lothrop
Stoddard, an eminent authority on this subject, so aptly calls "the
rising tide of colour." We white people seldom stop to realize how
overwhelmingly we are outnumbered. Out of the world population of
approximately 1,700,000,000 persons (I am using Mr. Stoddard's figures),
only 550,000,000 are white.

A colour conflict is improbable but by no means impossible. We have only
to look at our own troubles with the Japanese to get an intimate glimpse
of what might lurk in a yellow tidal wave. The yellow man humbled Russia
in the Russo-Japanese War and he smashed the Germans at Kiao Chow in
the Great War. The fact that he was permitted to fight shoulder to
shoulder with the white man has only added to his cockiness as we have
discovered in California.

Remember too that the Germans stirred up all Islam in their mad attempt
to conquer the world. The Mohammedan has not forgotten what the Teutonic
propagandists told him when they laid the cunning train of bad feeling
that precipitated Turkey into the Great War. These seeds of discord are
bearing fruit in many Near Eastern quarters. One result is that a
British army is fighting in Mesopotamia now. A Holy War is merely the
full