He wanted the United States to stand as the white race’s reserve of man-power when Europe had been bled white. But what will be the effect of all this upon that colored majority whose preponderant existence our newspapers ignore? In the first place, it will feel the lifting of the pressure as the iron hand of “discipline” is relaxed. And it will expand, when that pressure is removed, to the point where it will first ask, then demand, and finally secure, the right of self-determination. It will insist that, not only the white world, but the whole world, be made “safe for democracy.” This will mean a self-governing Egypt, a self-governing India, and independent African states as large as Germany and France—and larger. And, as a result, there will come a shifting of the basis of international politics and business and of international control. This is the living thought that comes to me from the newspapers and books that have been written and published by colored men in Africa and Asia during the past three years. It is what I have heard from their own lips as I have talked with them. And, yet, of this thought which is inflaming the international underworld, not a word appears in the parochial press of America, which seems to think that if it can keep its own Negroes down to servile lip-service, it need not face the world-wide problem of the “Conflict of Color,” as Mr. Putnam-Weale calls it. But that the more intelligent portions of the white world are becoming distressingly conscious of it, is evident from the first great manifesto of the Russian Bolsheviki last year when they asked about Britain’s subject peoples. And the British workingmen have evidently done some thinking in their turn. In their latest declarations they seem to see the ultimate necessity of compelling their own aristocrats to forego such imperial aspirations as that of Sir Harry Johnston, and of extending the principle of self-determination even to the black people of Africa. But eyes which have for centuries been behind the blinkers of race prejudice cannot but blink and water when compelled to face the full sunlight. And Britain’s workers insist that “No one will maintain that the Africans are fit for self-government.” And on the same principle (of excluding the opinion of those who are most vitally concerned) Britain’s ruling class may tell them that “No one maintains that the laboring classes of Britain are fit for self-government.” But their half-hearted demand that an international committee shall take over the British, German, French and Portuguese possessions in Africa and manage them as independent nationalities(?) until they can “go it alone,” would suggest that their eyesight is improving.