Why the difference? It is because the international linking up of peoples is a source of strength to those who are linked up. Naturally, the overlords want to strengthen themselves. And, quite as naturally, they wish to keep their subject masses from strengthening themselves in the same way. Today the great world-majority, made up of black, brown and yellow peoples, are stretching out their hands to each other and developing a “consciousness of kind”—as Professor Giddings would call it. They are seeking to establish their own centers of diffusion for their own internationalism, and this fact is giving nightmares to Downing street, the Quai d’Orsay and other centers of white capitalist internationalism. The object of the capitalist international is to unify and standardize the exploitation of black, brown and yellow peoples in such a way that the danger to the exploiting groups of cutting each other’s throats over the spoils may be reduced to a minimum. Hence the various agreements, mandates and spheres of influence. Hence the League of Nations, which is notoriously not a league of the white masses, but of their gold-braided governors. Faced by such a tendency on the part of those who bear the white man’s burden for what they can get out of it, the darker peoples of the world have begun to realize that their first duty is to themselves. A similarity of suffering is producing in them a similarity of sentiment, and the temper of that sentiment is not to be mistaken. To the white statesmen “civilization” is identical with their own overlordship, with their right and power to dictate to the darker millions what their way of life and of allegiance shall be. To this the aroused sentiment of the world’s darker majority demurs. They want to be as free as England, America or France. They do not wish to be “wards of the nations” of Europe any longer. And the problem for the white statesmen of the future will be to square democracy with the subjection of this dark majority. Can they achieve either horn of this dilemma? Can they effect a junction of the two? Frankly, we doubt it. Continued suppression may be fraught with consequences disastrous to white overlordship. In any case the tendency toward an international of the darker races cannot be set back. Increasing enlightenment, the spread of technical science, and the recently acquired knowledge of the weak points of white “civilization” gained by the darker peoples during the recent World War, are enough to negative such a supposition. The darker peoples will strive increasingly for their share of sunlight, and if this is what white “civilization” opposes, then white “civilization” is likely to have a hard time of it. _The Rising Tide of Color_