Perhaps we are wasting our time in offering an explanation to the white men of this country. It has been proven again and again that the Anglo-Saxon is such a professional liar that with the plain truth before his eyes he will still profess to be seeing something else. Nevertheless we make the attempt because we believe that a double benefit may accrue to us thereby. Does any reader who lived through the years from 1914 to 1919 and is still living remember what “Democracy” was? It was the U-need-a Biscuit advertised by Messrs. Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and thousands of perspiring publicists, preachers and thinkers, who were on one side of a conflict then raging in Europe. Now, you cannot get men to go out and get killed by telling them plainly that you who are sending them want to get the other fellow’s land, trade and wealth, and you are too cowardly or too intelligent to go yourself and risk getting shot over the acquisition. That would never do. So you whoop it up with any catchword which will serve as sufficient bait for the silly fools whom you keep silly in order that you may always use them in this way. “Democracy” was such a catch-word, and the honorable gentlemen to whom we referred above advertised it for all it was worth—to them. But, just as we prophesied in 1915, there was an unavoidable flare-back. When you advertise U-need-a Biscuit incessantly people will want it; and when you advertise democracy incessantly the people to whom you trumpet forth its deliciousness are likely to believe you, take you at your word, and, later on, demand that you make good and furnish them with the article for which you yourself have created the appetite. Now, we Negroes, Egyptians and Hindus, under the pressure of democracy’s commercial drummers, have developed a democratic complex which in its turbulent insistence is apt to trouble the firms for whom these drummers drummed. Because they haven’t any of the goods which they advertised in the first place, and, in the second place, they haven’t the slightest intention of passing any of it on—even if they had.