ndred millions of black men,
with less than one hundred thousand whites.

Commercial exploitation in Africa has already larger results to show
than most people realize. Annually $200,000,000 worth of goods was
coming out of black Africa before the World War, including a third of
the world's supply of rubber, a quarter of all of the world's cocoa, and
practically all of the world's cloves, gum-arabic, and palm-oil. In
exchange there was being returned to Africa one hundred millions in
cotton cloth, twenty-five millions in iron and steel, and as much in
foods, and probably twenty-five millions in liquors.

Here are the beginnings of a modern industrial system: iron and steel
for permanent investment, bound to yield large dividends; cloth as the
cheapest exchange for invaluable raw material; liquor to tickle the
appetites of the natives and render the alienation of land and the
breakdown of customary law easier; eventually forced and contract labor
under white drivers to increase and systematize the production of raw
materials. These materials are capable of indefinite expansion: cotton
may yet challenge the southern United States, fruits and vegetables,
hides and skins, lumber and dye-stuffs, coffee and tea, grain and
tobacco, and fibers of all sorts can easily follow organized and
systematic toil.

Is it a paradise of industry we thus contemplate? It is much more likely
to be a hell. Under present plans there will be no voice or law or
custom to protect labor, no trades unions, no eight-hour laws, no
factory legislation,--nothing of that great body of legislation built up
in modern days to protect mankind from sinking to the level of beasts of
burden. All the industrial deviltry, which civilization has been driving
to the slums and the backwaters, will have a voiceless continent to
conceal it. If the slave cannot be taken from Africa, slavery can be
taken to Africa.

Who are the folk who live here? They are brown and black, curly and
crisp-haired, short and tall, and longheaded. Out of them in days
without date flowed the beginnings of Egypt; among them rose, later,
centers of culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu. Kingdoms and empires
flourished in Songhay and Zymbabwe, and art and industry in Yoruba and
Benin. They have fought every human calamity in its most hideous form
and yet today they hold some similar vestiges of a mighty past,--their
work in iron, their weaving and carving, their music and singing, their
t