In America the door at least stands open for Negro progress. In Africa, and especially in South Africa, it is not quite certain that the door is not closed. If the door remains ajar it is not because the white man wills it, but because the American Negro has got his foot in. A low Commercial-Imperial idea reigns. The native is, “the labor on the spot.” An unfailing supply of cheap native labor is considered the great desideratum. Attempts on the Negro’s part to raise himself by education or by technical skill are looked upon with suspicion, and one must remember that as far as the British Empire or French or Belgian mandatorial regions are concerned there are no institutions in Africa comparable to Tuskegee and Hampton. If the labor unions in the United States are foolishly antagonistic to the progress of Negro skilled labor, they are twice more so in South Africa. If there is peonage in America there is an abundance of pseudo slavery in Africa, and while the American trolley car has its Jim Crow section the South African one often has not even that, and the Negro must walk unless accompanied by white employer. An open hostility has arisen between Black and White which much resembles that of the Southern States of America. If it were not for the leadership of the American Negroes it would not be promising for Negrodom as a whole. Of course there is a vital difference between the British Empire and the United States; the people of the empire are subjects, and of the republic they are citizens. While Britain technically rules her four hundred million colored subjects _from above downward_ America theoretically holds that all her people are free and equal. The American ideal is higher, the British more practical. There is another difference, and it is that our Blacks, except in the Indies, are mostly indigenous, and have not been transplanted from their native wilds. They have not been slaves and have not the slave psychology. In Africa the white man is in contact with masses of natives in a primitive condition; in the United States the Negro has been definitely cut off from his kith and kin. The American Negro was set free in a land rampant with democratic ideals and possessed of a sublime belief in human progress. But Africa has been and is increasingly a commercial domain whose only function from the modern white man’s point of view is the making of material fortune. The white man in Africa is much more exclusively a dollar hunter than the American. And though Britain has been much praised for letting South Africa govern herself it does not seem as if the Union was mating much progress in ideals and culture. The King of England was a better friend to the native than the local government is proving itself to be.