Unthankful we wince in the East, Unthankful we wail from the westward, Unthankfully thankful, we curse, In the unworn wastes of the wild: I hate them, Oh! I hate them well, I hate them, Christ! As I hate hell! If I were God, I'd sound their knell This day! Who raised the fools to their glory, But black men of Egypt and Ind, Ethiopia's sons of the evening, Indians and yellow Chinese, Arabian children of morning, And mongrels of Rome and Greece? Ah, well! And they that raised the boasters Shall drag them down again,-- Down with the theft of their thieving And murder and mocking of men; Down with their barter of women And laying and lying of creeds; Down with their cheating of childhood And drunken orgies of war,-- down down deep down, Till the devil's strength be shorn, Till some dim, darker David, a-hoeing of his corn, And married maiden, mother of God, Bid the black Christ be born! Then shall our burden be manhood, Be it yellow or black or white; And poverty and justice and sorrow, The humble, and simple and strong Shall sing with the sons of morning And daughters of even-song: Black mother of the iron hills that ward the blazing sea, Wild spirit of a storm-swept soul, a-struggling to be free, Where 'neath the bloody finger-marks thy riven bosom quakes, Thicken the thunders of God's Voice and lo! a world awakes! III THE HANDS OF ETHIOPIA "_Semper novi quid ex Africa_," cried the Roman proconsul, and he voiced the verdict of forty centuries. Yet there are those who would write world history and leave out of account this most marvelous of continents. Particularly today most men assume that Africa is far afield from the center of our burning social problems and especially from our problem of world war. Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, which grew so mightily that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses came, if we may credit many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness. Nearly every human empire that has arisen in the world, material and spiritual, has found some of its greatest crises on this continent of Africa, from Greece to Great Britain. As Mommsen says: "It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world." In Africa the last flood of Germanic invasions spent itself within hearing of the last gasp of Byzantium, and it was through Africa that Islam came to play its great role of conqueror and civilizer.