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Darkwater - Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois
page 38 of 248 (15%)
in Europe? Hardly, save in the half-Asiatic problems of the Balkans.
What, then, does Hauptmann mean when he says: "Our jealous enemies
forged an iron ring about our breasts and we knew our breasts had to
expand,--that we had to split asunder this ring or else we had to cease
breathing. But Germany will not cease to breathe and so it came to pass
that the iron ring was forced apart."

Whither is this expansion? What is that breath of life, thought to be so
indispensable to a great European nation? Manifestly it is expansion
overseas; it is colonial aggrandizement which explains, and alone
adequately explains, the World War. How many of us today fully realize
the current theory of colonial expansion, of the relation of Europe
which is white, to the world which is black and brown and yellow?
Bluntly put, that theory is this: It is the duty of white Europe to
divide up the darker world and administer it for Europe's good.

This Europe has largely done. The European world is using black and
brown men for all the uses which men know. Slowly but surely white
culture is evolving the theory that "darkies" are born beasts of burden
for white folk. It were silly to think otherwise, cries the cultured
world, with stronger and shriller accord. The supporting arguments grow
and twist themselves in the mouths of merchant, scientist, soldier,
traveler, writer, and missionary: Darker peoples are dark in mind as
well as in body; of dark, uncertain, and imperfect descent; of frailer,
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
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