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Darkwater - Voices from Within the Veil by W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois
page 56 of 248 (22%)
permanent relief can come but by including in this organization the
lowest and the most exploited races in the world. World philanthropy,
like national philanthropy, must come as uplift and prevention and not
merely as alleviation and religious conversion. Reverence for humanity,
as such, must be installed in the world, and Africa should be the
talisman.

Black Africa, including British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Italian,
and Spanish possessions and the independent states of Abyssinia and
Liberia and leaving out of account Egypt and North Africa, on the one
hand, and South Africa, on the other, has an area of 8,200,000 square
miles and a population well over one hundred millions of black men,
with less than one hundred thousand whites.

Commercial exploitation in Africa has already larger results to show
than most people realize. Annually $200,000,000 worth of goods was
coming out of black Africa before the World War, including a third of
the world's supply of rubber, a quarter of all of the world's cocoa, and
practically all of the world's cloves, gum-arabic, and palm-oil. In
exchange there was being returned to Africa one hundred millions in
cotton cloth, twenty-five millions in iron and steel, and as much in
foods, and probably twenty-five millions in liquors.

Here are the beginnings of a modern industrial system: iron and steel
for permanent investment, bound to yield large dividends; cloth as the
cheapest exchange for invaluable raw material; liquor to tickle the
appetites of the natives and render the alienation of land and the
breakdown of customary law easier; eventually forced and contract labor
under white drivers to increase and systematize the production of raw
materials. These materials are capable of indefinite expansion: cotton
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