“Rightly governed, I venture to predict that Africa will, if we are victorious, repay us and all our allies the cost of our struggle with Germany and Austria. The war, deny it who may, was really fought over African questions. The Germans wished, as the chief gain of victory, to wrest rich Morocco from French control, to take the French Congo from France, and the Portuguese Congo from Portugal, to secure from Belgium the richest and most extensive tract of alluvial goldfield as yet discovered. This is an auriferous region which, properly developed, will, when war is over, repay the hardest hit of our allies (France) all that she has lost from the German devastation of her home lands. The mineral wealth of trans-Zambezian Africa—freed forever, we will hope, from the German menacemis gigantic; only slightly exploited so far. Wealth is hidden amid the seemingly unprofitable deserts of the Sahara, Nubia, Somaliland and Namaqua. Africa, I predict, will eventually show itself to be the most richly endowed of all the continents in valuable vegetable and mineral substances.” There is the sum and substance of what Schopenhauer would have called “the sufficient reason” for this war. No word of “democracy” there, but instead the easy assumption that, as a matter of course, the lands of black Africa belong to white Europe and must be apportioned on the good old principle:— “… the simple plan, That he shall take who has the power, And he must keep who can.” _The Economics of War_