declare what they WANT. They must camouflage their sordid greed behind some sounding phrase like “freedom of the seas,” “self-determination,” “liberty” or “democracy.” But only the ignorant millions ever think that those are the real objects of their bloody rivalries. When the war is over, the mask is dropped, and then they seek “how best to scramble at the shearers’ feast.” It is then that they disclose their real war aims.

One of the most striking cases in point is the present peace congress. Already President Wilson has had to go to look after democracy himself. Already responsible heads of the Allied governments are making it known that “freedom of the seas” means a benevolent naval despotism maintained by them, and that “democracy” means simply the transfer of Germany’s African lands to England and the others. Africa at the peace table constitutes the real stakes which the winners will rake in. We may read in headlines the startling item “Negroes Ask For German Colonies,” but Negroes of sense should not be deluded. They will not get them because they have no battleships, no guns, no force, military or financial. They are not a Power.

Despite the pious piffle of nice old gentlemen like Professor Kelly Miller, the King-word of modern nations is POWER. It is only Sunday school “kids” and people of child-races who take seriously such fables as that in the “Band of Hope Review” when we were children that “the secret of England’s greatness is the Bible.” The secret of England’s greatness (as well as of any other great nation’s) is not bibles but bayonets—bayonets, business and brains. As long as the white nations have a preponderance of these, so long will they rule. Ask Japan: she knows. And as long as the lands of Africa can yield billions of business, so long will white brains use bayonets to keep them—as the British government did last year in Nigeria.

Africa is turning over in her sleep, and this agitation now going on among American Negroes for the liberation of Africa is a healthy sign of her restlessness. But it is no more than that. Africa’s hands are tied, and, so tied, she will be thrown upon the peace table. Let us study how to unloose her bonds later. Instead of futile expectations from the doubtful generosity of white land-grabbers, let us American Negroes go to Africa, live among the natives and LEARN WHAT THEY HAVE TO TEACH US (for they have much to teach us). Let us go there—not in the coastlands,—but in the interior, in Nigeria and Nyassaland; let us study engineering and physics, chemistry and commerce, agriculture and industry; let us learn more of nitrates, of copper, rubber and 

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