ribal government, their town-meeting and marketplace, their desperate
valor in war.

Missionaries and commerce have left some good with all their evil. In
black Africa today there are more than a thousand government schools and
some thirty thousand mission schools, with a more or less regular
attendance of three-quarters of a million school children. In a few
cases training of a higher order is given chiefs' sons and selected
pupils. These beginnings of education are not much for so vast a land
and there is no general standard or set plan of development, but, after
all, the children of Africa are beginning to learn.

In black Africa today only one-seventeenth of the land and a ninth of
the people in Liberia and Abyssinia are approximately independent,
although menaced and policed by European capitalism. Half the land and
the people are in domains under Portugal, France, and Belgium, held with
the avowed idea of exploitation for the benefit of Europe under a system
of caste and color serfdom. Out of this dangerous nadir of development
stretch two paths: one is indicated by the condition of about three per
cent of the people who in Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and French
Senegal, are tending toward the path of modern development; the other
path, followed by a fourth of the land and people, has local
self-government and native customs and might evolve, if undisturbed, a
native culture along their own peculiar lines. A tenth of the land,
sparsely settled, is being monopolized and held for whites to make an
African Australia. To these later folk must be added the four and
one-half millions of the South African Union, who by every modern device
are being forced into landless serfdom.

Before the World War tendencies were strongly toward the destruction of
independent Africa, the industrial slavery of the mass of the blacks and
the encouragement of white immigration, where possible, to hold the
blacks in subjection.

Against this idea let us set the conception of a new African World
State, a Black Africa, applying to these peoples the splendid
pronouncements which have of late been so broadly and perhaps carelessly
given the world: recognizing in Africa the declaration of the American
Federation of Labor, that "no people must be forced under sovereignty
under which it does not wish to live"; recognizing in President Wilson's
message to the Russians, the "principle of the undictated development of
all peoples"; recognizing