ty and Fraternity."

A voice broke in from halfway down the hall, a voice heavy with British
accent. "I say, why did you Yanks free the Philippines?"

Homer Crawford laughed, as did several other Americans present. "That's
the first time I've ever been called a Yankee," he said. "But the point
is well taken. By freeing the islands we washed our hands of the
responsibility of such expensive matters as their health and education,
and at the same time we granted freedom we made military and economic
treaties which perpetuated our fundamental control of the Philippines.

"The point is made. The distrust of the European and the white man as a
whole was prevalent, especially here in Africa. However, and
particularly in Africa, the citizens of the new countries were almost
unbelievably uneducated, untrained, incapable of engineering their own
destiny. In whole nations there was not a single lawyer or--"

"That's no handicap," somebody called.

There was laughter through the hall.

Homer Crawford laughed, too, and nodded as though in solemn agreement.
"However, there were also no doctors, engineers, scientists. There were
whole nations without a single college graduate."

He paused and his eyes swept the hall. "That's where we came in. Most of
us here this afternoon are from the States, however, also represented to
my knowledge are British West Indians, a Canadian or two, at least one
Panamanian, and possibly some Cubans. Down in the southern part of the
continent I know of teams working in the Portuguese areas who are
Brazilian in background. All of us, of course, are Africans racially,
but few if any of us know from what part of Africa his forebears came.
My own grandfather was born a slave in Mississippi and didn't know his
father; my grandmother was already a hopeless mixture of a score of
African tribes.

"That, I assume, is the story of most if not all of us. Our ancestors
were wrenched from the lands of their birth and shipped under conditions
worse than cattle to the New World." He added simply, "Now we return."

There was a murmur throughout his listeners, but no one interrupted.

"When the great powers of Europe arbitrarily split up Africa in the
Nineteenth Century they didn't bother with race, tribe, not even
geographic boundaries. Largely they seemed to draw their boundary lines
with ruler and pencil on a Mercator projection. Often, not only were
native nations split in twain but even tribes and clans, and