tropical
Africa, however, and the limits of this area may be defined to the
proposed Supernational Authority, or League of Nations."
Lloyd George himself has said in regard to the German colonies a word
difficult to restrict merely to them: "I have repeatedly declared that
they are held at the disposal of a conference, whose decision must have
primary regard to the wishes and interests of the native inhabitants of
such colonies. None of those territories is inhabited by Europeans. The
governing considerations, therefore, must be that the inhabitants should
be placed under the control of an administration acceptable to
themselves, one of whose main purposes will be to prevent their
exploitation for the benefit of European capitalists or governments."
The special commission for the government of this African State must,
naturally, be chosen with great care and thought. It must represent, not
simply governments, but civilization, science, commerce, social reform,
religious philanthropy without sectarian propaganda. It must include,
not simply white men, but educated and trained men of Negro blood. The
guiding principles before such a commission should be clearly
understood. In the first place, it ought by this time to be realized by
the labor movement throughout the world that no industrial democracy can
be built on industrial despotism, whether the two systems are in the
same country or in different countries, since the world today so nearly
approaches a common industrial unity. If, therefore, it is impossible in
any single land to uplift permanently skilled labor without also raising
common labor, so, too, there can be no permanent uplift of American or
European labor as long as African laborers are slaves.
Secondly, this building of a new African State does not mean the
segregation in it of all the world's black folk. It is too late in the
history of the world to go back to the idea of absolute racial
segregation. The new African State would not involve any idea of a vast
transplantation of the twenty-seven million Negroids of the western
world, of Africa, or of the gathering there of Negroid Asia. The Negroes
in the United States and the other Americas have earned the right to
fight out their problems where they are, but they could easily furnish
from time to time technical experts, leaders of thought, and
missionaries of culture for their backward brethren in the new Africa.
With these two principles, the pract
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