or from Altruria might see here no peculiar problem. He
would expect the Negro race to develop along the lines of other human
races. In Africa his economic and political development would restore and
eventually outrun the ancient glories of Egypt, Ethiopia, and Yoruba;
overseas the West Indies would become a new and nobler Africa, built in
the very pathway of the new highway of commerce between East and West--the
real sea route to India; while in the United States a large part of its
citizenship (showing for perhaps centuries their dark descent, but
nevertheless equal sharers of and contributors to the civilization of the
West) would be the descendants of the wretched victims of the seventeenth,
eighteenth, and nineteenth century slave trade.

This natural assumption of a stranger finds, however, lodging in the minds
of few present-day thinkers. On the contrary, such an outcome is usually
dismissed summarily. Most persons have accepted that tacit but clear
modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of
the world and assumes that other races, and particularly the Negro race,
will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out
before their all-conquering march. This philosophy is the child of the
African slave trade and of the expansion of Europe during the nineteenth
century.

The Negro slave trade was the first step in modern world commerce,
followed by the modern theory of colonial expansion. Slaves as an article
of commerce were shipped as long as the traffic paid. When the Americas
had enough black laborers for their immediate demand, the moral action of
the eighteenth century had a chance to make its faint voice heard.

The moral repugnance was powerfully reenforced by the revolt of the slaves
in the West Indies and South America, and by the fact that North America
early began to regard itself as the seat of advanced ideas in politics,
religion, and humanity.

Finally European capital began to find better investments than slave
shipping and flew to them. These better investments were the fruit of the
new industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, with its factory
system; they were also in part the result of the cheapened price of gold
and silver, brought about by slavery and the slave trade to the new world.
Commodities other than gold, and commodities capable of manufacture and
exploitation in Europe out of materials furnishable by America, became
enhanced in val