Capital could not only be accumulated in Africa, but attracted from the
white world, with one great difference from present usage: no return so
fabulous would be offered that civilized lands would be tempted to
divert to colonial trade and invest materials and labor needed by the
masses at home, but rather would receive the same modest profits as
legitimate home industry offers.

There is no sense in asserting that the ideal of an African State, thus
governed and directed toward independence and self-government, is
impossible of realization. The first great essential is that the
civilized world believe in its possibility. By reason of a crime
(perhaps the greatest crime in human history) the modern world has been
systematically taught to despise colored peoples. Men of education and
decency ask, and ask seriously, if it is really possible to uplift
Africa. Are Negroes human, or, if human, developed far enough to absorb,
even under benevolent tutelage, any appreciable part of modern culture?
Has not the experiment been tried in Haiti and Liberia, and failed?

One cannot ignore the extraordinary fact that a world campaign beginning
with the slave-trade and ending with the refusal to capitalize the word
"Negro," leading through a passionate defense of slavery by attributing
every bestiality to blacks and finally culminating in the evident modern
profit which lies in degrading blacks,--all this has unconsciously
trained millions of honest, modern men into the belief that black folk
are sub-human. This belief is not based on science, else it would be
held as a postulate of the most tentative kind, ready at any time to be
withdrawn in the face of facts; the belief is not based on history, for
it is absolutely contradicted by Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and
Arabian experience; nor is the belief based on any careful survey of the
social development of men of Negro blood to-day in Africa and America.
It is simply passionate, deep-seated heritage, and as such can be moved
by neither argument nor fact. Only faith in humanity will lead the world
to rise above its present color prejudice.

Those who do believe in men, who know what black men have done in human
history, who have taken pains to follow even superficially the story of
the rise of the Negro in Africa, the West Indies, and the Americas of
our day know that our modern contempt of Negroes rests upon no

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