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.