brother of the possible War of Colour. In East Africa the Germans
used thousands of native troops against the British and Belgians. The
blacks got a taste, figuratively, of the white man's blood and it did
his system no good.

Throughout the globe there are 150,000,000 blacks and all but 30,000,000
of them are south of the Sahara Desert in Africa. They lack the high
mental development of the yellow man as expressed in the Japanese, but
even brute force is not to be despised, especially where it outnumbers
the whites to the extent that they do in South Africa. I am no alarmist
and I do not presume to say that there will be serious trouble. I merely
present these facts to show that certainly so far as affecting
production and economic security in general is concerned, the native
still provides a vexing and irritating problem, not without danger.

The Union of South Africa is keenly alive to this perplexing native
situation. Its policy is what might be called the Direct Rule, in which
the whole administration of the country is in the hands of the Europeans
and which is the opposite of the Indirect Rule of India, for example,
which recognizes Rajahs and other potentates and which permits the brown
man to hold a variety of public posts.

The Government of the Cape Colony is becoming convinced that Booker
Washington's idea is the sole salvation of the race. That great leader
maintained that the hope for the Negro in the United States and
elsewhere lay in the training of his hands. Once those hands were
skilled they could be kept out of mischief. I recall having discussed
this theory one night with General Smuts at Capetown and he expressed
his hearty approval of it.

The lamented Botha died before he could put into operation a plan which
held out the promise of still another kind of solution. It lay in the
soil. He contended that an area of forty million acres should be set
aside for the natives, where many could work out their destinies
themselves. While this plan offered the opportunity for the
establishment of a compact and perhaps dangerous black entity, his
feeling was that by the avoidance of friction with the whites the
possibility of trouble would be minimized. This scheme is likely to be
carried out by Smuts.

Since the Union of South Africa profited by the whirligig of war to the
extent of acquiring German South-West Africa it only remains to speak of
the new map of Africa, made possible by the Great Conflict.