may yet challenge the southern United States, fruits and vegetables,
hides and skins, lumber and dye-stuffs, coffee and tea, grain and
tobacco, and fibers of all sorts can easily follow organized and
systematic toil.

Is it a paradise of industry we thus contemplate? It is much more likely
to be a hell. Under present plans there will be no voice or law or
custom to protect labor, no trades unions, no eight-hour laws, no
factory legislation,--nothing of that great body of legislation built up
in modern days to protect mankind from sinking to the level of beasts of
burden. All the industrial deviltry, which civilization has been driving
to the slums and the backwaters, will have a voiceless continent to
conceal it. If the slave cannot be taken from Africa, slavery can be
taken to Africa.

Who are the folk who live here? They are brown and black, curly and
crisp-haired, short and tall, and longheaded. Out of them in days
without date flowed the beginnings of Egypt; among them rose, later,
centers of culture at Ghana, Melle, and Timbuktu. Kingdoms and empires
flourished in Songhay and Zymbabwe, and art and industry in Yoruba and
Benin. They have fought every human calamity in its most hideous form
and yet today they hold some similar vestiges of a mighty past,--their
work in iron, their weaving and carving, their music and singing, their
tribal government, their town-meeting and marketplace, their desperate
valor in war.

Missionaries and commerce have left some good with all their evil. In
black Africa today there are more than a thousand government schools and
some thirty thousand mission schools, with a more or less regular
attendance of three-quarters of a million school children. In a few