ell, but of
all that the world gets the black world gets only the pittance that the
white world throws it disdainfully.

Small wonder, then, that in the practical world of things-that-be there
is jealousy and strife for the possession of the labor of dark millions,
for the right to bleed and exploit the colonies of the world where this
golden stream may be had, not always for the asking, but surely for the
whipping and shooting. It was this competition for the labor of yellow,
brown, and black folks that was the cause of the World War. Other causes
have been glibly given and other contributing causes there doubtless
were, but they were subsidiary and subordinate to this vast quest of the
dark world's wealth and toil.

Colonies, we call them, these places where "niggers" are cheap and the
earth is rich; they are those outlands where like a swarm of hungry
locusts white masters may settle to be served as kings, wield the lash
of slave-drivers, rape girls and wives, grow as rich as Croesus and send
homeward a golden stream. They belt the earth, these places, but they
cluster in the tropics, with its darkened peoples: in Hong Kong and
Anam, in Borneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, in Panama and
Havana--these are the El Dorados toward which the world powers stretch
itching palms.

Germany, at last one and united and secure on land, looked across the
seas and seeing England with sources of wealth insuring a luxury and
power which Germany could not hope to rival by the slower processes of
exploiting her own peasants and workingmen, especially with these
workers half in revolt, immediately built her navy and entered into a
desperate competition for possession of colonies of darker peoples. To
South America, to China, to Africa, to Asia Minor, she turned like a
hound quivering on the leash, impatient, suspicious, irritable, with
blood-shot eyes and dripping fangs, ready for the awful word. England
and France crouched watchfully over their bones, growling and wary, but
gnawing industriously, while the blood of the dark world whetted their
greedy appetites. In the background, shut out from the highway to the
seven seas, sat Russia and Austria, snarling and snapping at each other
and at the last Mediterranean gate to the El Dorado, where the Sick Man
enjoyed bad health, and where millions of serfs in the Balkans, Russia,
and Asia offered a feast to greed well-nigh as great as Africa.

The fateful day came. It had to