"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.