Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil
cheaper stuff; they are cowards in the face of mausers and maxims; they
have no feelings, aspirations, and loves; they are fools, illogical
idiots,--"half-devil and half-child."
Such as they are civilization must, naturally, raise them, but soberly
and in limited ways. They are not simply dark white men. They are not
"men" in the sense that Europeans are men. To the very limited extent of
their shallow capacities lift them to be useful to whites, to raise
cotton, gather rubber, fetch ivory, dig diamonds,--and let them be paid
what men think they are worth--white men who know them to be well-nigh
worthless.
Such degrading of men by men is as old as mankind and the invention of
no one race or people. Ever have men striven to conceive of their
victims as different from the victors, endlessly different, in soul and
blood, strength and cunning, race and lineage. It has been left,
however, to Europe and to modern days to discover the eternal world-wide
mark of meanness,--color!
Such is the silent revolution that has gripped modern European culture
in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its zenith came in
Boxer times: White supremacy was all but world-wide, Africa was dead,
India conquered, Japan isolated, and China prostrate, while white
America whetted her sword for mongrel Mexico and mulatto South America,
lynching her own Negroes the while. Temporary halt in this program was
made by little Japan and the white world immediately sensed the peril of
such "yellow" presumption! What sort of a world would this be if yellow
men must be treated "white"? Immediately the eventual overthrow of Japan
became a subject of deep thought and intrigue, from St. Petersburg to
San Francisco, from the Key of Heaven to the Little Brother of the Poor.
The using of men for the benefit of masters is no new invention of
modern Europe. It is quite as old as the world. But Europe proposed to
apply it on a scale and with an elaborateness of detail of which no
former world ever dreamed. The imperial width of the thing,--the
heaven-defying audacity--makes its modern newness.
The scheme of Europe was no sudden invention, but a way out of
long-pressing difficulties. It is plain to modern white civilization
that the subjection of the white working classes cannot much longer be
maintained. Education, political power, and increased knowledge of the
technique and meaning of the industrial process are destined to make a
more and more equitable distribution of wealth in the near future. The
day of the very rich is drawing to a close, so far as individual white
nations are concerned. But there is a loophole. There is a chance for
exploitation on an immense scale for inordinate profit, not simply to
the very rich, but to the middle class and to the laborers. This chance
lies in the exploitation of darker peoples. It is here that the golden
hand beckons. Here are no labor unions or votes or questioning onlookers
or inconvenient consciences. These men may be used down to the very
bone, and shot and maimed in "punitive" expeditions when they revolt. In
these dark lands "industrial development" may repeat in exaggerated form
every horror of the industrial history of Europe, from slavery and rape
to disease and maiming, with only one test of success,--dividends!
This theory of human culture and its aims has worked itself through warp
and woof of our daily thought with a thoroughness that few realize.
Everything great, good, efficient, fair, and honorable is "white";
everything mean, bad, blundering, cheating, and dishonorable is
"yellow"; a bad taste is "brown"; and the devil is "black." The changes
of this theme are continually rung in picture and story, in newspaper
heading and moving-picture, in sermon and school book, until, of course,
the King can do no wrong,--a White Man is always right and a Black Man
has no rights which a white man is bound to respect.
There must come the necessary despisings and hatreds of these savage
half-men, this unclean _canaille_ of the world--these dogs of men. All
through the world this gospel is preaching. It has its literature, it
has its secret propaganda and above all--it pays!
There's the rub,--it pays. Rubber, ivory, and palm-oil; tea, coffee, and
cocoa; bananas, oranges, and other fruit; cotton, gold, and
copper--they, and a hundred other things which dark and sweating bodies
hand up to the white world from pits of slime, pay and pay well, but of
all that the world gets the black world gets only the pittance that the
white world throws it disdainfully.
Small wonder, then, that in the practical world of things-that-be there
is jealousy and strife for the possession of the labor of dark millions,
for the right to bleed and exploit the colonies of the world where this
golden stream may be had, not always for the asking, but surely for the
whipping and shooting. It was this competition for the labor of yellow,
brown, and black folks that was the cause of the World War. Other causes
have been glibly given and other contributing causes there doubtless
were, but they were subsidiary and subordinate to this vast quest of the
dark world's wealth and toil.
Colonies, we call them, these places where "niggers" are cheap and the
earth is rich; they are those outlands where like a swarm of hungry
locusts white masters may settle to be served as kings, wield the lash
of slave-drivers, rape girls and wives, grow as rich as Croesus and send
homeward a golden stream. They belt the earth, these places, but they
cluster in the tropics, with its darkened peoples: in Hong Kong and
Anam, in Borneo and Rhodesia, in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, in Panama and
Havana--these are the El Dorados toward which the world powers stretch
itching palms.
Germany, at last one and united and secure on land, looked across the
seas and seeing England with sources of wealth insuring a luxury and
power which Germany could not hope to rival by the slower processes of
exploiting her own peasants and workingmen, especially with these
workers half in revolt, immediately built her navy and entered into a
desperate competition for possession of colonies of darker peoples. To
South America, to China, to Africa, to Asia Minor, she turned like a
hound quivering on the leash, impatient, suspicious, irritable, with
blood-shot eyes and dripping fangs, ready for the awful word. England
and France crouched watchfully over their bones, growling and wary, but
gnawing industriously, while the blood of the dark world whetted their
greedy appetites. In the background, shut out from the highway to the
seven seas, sat Russia and Austria, snarling and snapping at each other
and at the last Mediterranean gate to the El Dorado, where the Sick Man
enjoyed bad health, and where millions of serfs in the Balkans, Russia,
and Asia offered a feast to greed well-nigh as great as Africa.
The fateful day came. It had to come. The cause of war is preparation
for war; and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing
that has equaled in energy, thought, and time her preparation for
wholesale murder. The only adequate cause of this preparation was
conquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darker
peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift,
but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, did Europe
gird herself at frightful cost for war.
The red day dawned when the tinder was lighted in the Balkans and
Austro-Hungary seized a bit which brought her a step nearer to the
world's highway; she seized one bit and poised herself for another. Then
came that curious chorus of challenges, those leaping suspicions, raking
all causes for distrust and rivalry and hatred, but saying little of the
real and greatest cause.
Each nation felt its deep interests involved. But how? Not, surely, in
the death of Ferdinand the Warlike; not, surely, in the old,
half-forgotten _revanche_ for Alsace-Lorraine; not even in the
neutrality of Belgium. No! But in the possession of land overseas, in
the right to colonies, the chance to levy endless tribute on the darker
world,--on coolies in China, on starving peasants in India, on black
savages in Africa, on dying South Sea Islanders, on Indians of the
Amazon--all this and nothing more.
Even the broken reed on which we had rested high hopes of eternal
peace,--the guild of the laborers--the front of that very important
movement for human justice on which we had builded most, even this flew
like a straw before the breath of king and kaiser. Indeed, the flying
had been foreshadowed when in Germany and America "international"
Socialists had all but read yellow and black men out of the kingdom of
industrial justice. Subtly had they been bribed, but effectively: Were
they not lordly whites and should they not share in the spoils of rape?
High wages in the United States and England might be the skilfully
manipulated result of slavery in Africa and of peonage in Asia.
With the dog-in-the-manger theory of trade, with the determination to
reap inordinate profits and to exploit the weakest to the utmost there
came a new imperialism,--the rage for one's own nation to own the earth
or, at least, a large enough portion of it to insure as big profits as
the next nation. Where sections could not be owned by one dominant
nation there came a policy of "open door," but the "door" was open to
"white people only." As to the darkest and weakest of peoples there was
but one unanimity in Europe,--that which Hen Demberg of the German
Colonial Office called the agreement with England to maintain white
"prestige" in Africa,--the doctrine of the divine right of white people
to steal.
Thus the world market most wildly and desperately sought today is the
market where labor is cheapest and most helpless and profit is most
abundant. This labor is kept cheap and helpless because the white world
despises "darkies." If one has the temerity to suggest that these
workingmen may walk the way of white workingmen and climb by votes and
self-assertion and education to the rank of men, he is howled out of
court. They cannot do it and if they could, they shall not, for they are
the enemies of the white race and the whites shall rule forever and
forever and everywhere. Thus the hatred and despising of human beings
from whom Europe wishes to extort her luxuries has led to such jealousy
and bickering between European nations that they have fallen afoul of
each other and have fought like crazed beasts. Such is the fruit of
human hatred.
But what of the darker world that watches? Most men belong to this
world. With Negro and Negroid, East Indian, Chinese, and Japanese they
form two-thirds of the population of the world. A belief in humanity is
a belief in colored men. If the uplift of mankind must be done by men,
then the destinies of this world will rest ultimately in the hands of
darker nations.
What, then, is this dark world thinking? It is thinking that as wild
and awful as this shameful war was, _it is nothing to compare with that
fight for freedom which black and brown and yellow men must and will
make unless their oppression and humiliation and insult at the hands of
the White World cease. The Dark World is going to submit to its present
treatment just as long as it must and not one moment longer._
Let me say this again and emphasize it and leave no room for mistaken
meaning: The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle
for the largest share in exploiting darker races. As such it is and must
be but the prelude to the armed and indignant protest of these despised
and raped peoples. Today Japan is hammering on the door of justice,
China is raising her half-manacled hands to knock next, India is
writhing for the freedom to knock, Egypt is sullenly muttering, the