In a previous paper I wrote of certain “stifled voices” at Washington. There is yet another stifled voice here that I have heard, and to speak of it opens up another great group of questions that stand in the way to any effectual organization of world peace through an Association of Nations. Until we get some provisional decision about this set of issues the Association of Nations remains a project in the air.

This stifled voice of which I am now writing is the voice of the colored people. As a novelist—a novelist in my spare time—and as a man very curious by nature, about human reactions, the peculiar situations created by “color” in America have always appealed to me. I do not understand why American fiction does not treat of them more frequently. It is the educated, highly intelligent colored people who get my interest and sympathy. I cannot get up any race feeling about them.

I am particularly proud to have known Booker T. Washington and to know Mr. Dubois, and this time, in spite of a great pressure of engagements, I was able to spend two hours last Sunday listening to the proceedings of the Washington Correspondence Club, an organization which battles by letter and interview and appeal against the harsh exclusions from theatres, schools, meetings, restaurants, libraries and the like, that prevail here.

I will not discuss here the rights and wrongs of a bar that cuts off most of the intellectual necessities and conveniences of life from many people who would pass as refined and cultivated whites in any European country. I mention this gathering merely to note a very interesting topic upon which I was called to account thereat.

Once or twice in these papers—I do not know if the reader has noted it—I have mentioned the French training of Senegalese troops and the objection felt by other European peoples to their extensive employment in Europe. I was asked at the Correspondence Club whether the objections I had made to this were not “fostering race prejudice,” and some interesting exchanges followed.

I was inclined to argue that the importation of African negroes into Europe for military purposes was as objectionable as their importation to America for economic services, but some of my hosts, some of the younger men, did not see it in that light. They are warmed toward the French by the notable absence of racial exclusiveness in France, and they see the ideals of that epoch-making book, “La France Negre,” from an entirely different angle. Why not a black France as big or bigger than white France and a new people who have learned military discipline, military service and united action from Europe?

“Why not an African Napoleon presently?” said the young man, a little wanting, I thought, in that abject meekness which is the American ideal of colored behavior.

He was imagining, I suppose, something happening in Africa rather after the fashion of the emancipation of Hayti and of great African armies pushing their former rulers back to the sea. But Col. Taylor has recently suggested another possibility, namely, that of France finding herself in the grip of a black Pretorian Guard. It is a just, conceivable fancy—a Pretorian Guard, French-speaking and ultra-patriotic, keeping French Socialists and pacifists and Bolsheviks in their proper place.

I do not believe very much in either of these possibilities nor even in the third possibility of European powers fighting each other with black armies in Africa, but I do perceive that dreams of a world peace will remain very insubstantial dreams, indeed, until we can work out a scheme or at least general principles of action for the treatment of Africa between the Sahara and the Zambesi River, a scheme that will give some sort of a quietus to the jealousies and hostilities evoked by the economic and political exploitations of annexed and mandatory territories upon nationalist and competitive lines in this region of the earth.

For it seems to be the fact that tropical and sub-tropical Africa has another function in the world than to be the home of the great family of negro peoples. Africa is economically necessary to European civilization as the chief source of vegetable oils and fats and various other products of no great value to the native population. European civilization can scarcely get along without these natural resources of Africa.

Now here we are up against a problem entirely different from the problem that arises in the case of India, Indo-China and China, which is the problem of a politically powerless but essentially civilized population which can be trusted to modernize itself and come into line with the existing efficient powers if only it is protected from oppressive and disintegrating forces while it adjusts itself.

Africa is quite incapable of anything of the sort. Negro Africa is mainly still in a state of tribal barbarism; in the latter half of the nineteenth century its peoples were in a condition of deepening disorder and misery due to the spread of European diseases and to the raiding of the Arab and native adventurers who had obtained possession of modern firearms. The small village communities of tropical Africa were quite unable to stand up against the brigand enterprises of mere bands of ruffians armed with rifles.

The scramble for Africa on the part of the European great powers toward the close of the nineteenth century—a scramble largely dictated by economic appetites—did a little to mitigate the miseries and destruction in progress by establishing a sort of order through large areas of Africa, a sort of order that in some regions was scarcely less cruel than the disorders it replaced. But if continuing access to the resources of Africa is to be maintained, and if a return to the Arab raider and general chaos and massacres is to be avoided, it is clear that in some form the control of the central parts of Africa by the modern civilized world must continue.

But we must be clear upon one point. If that control is to be maintained, as at present it is maintained by various European powers acting independently of one another and competing against one another, in the not very remote future Central Africa is bound to become a cause of war. Central Africa was one of the great prizes before the German imagination in 1914, and it is now held in a state of unstable equilibrium by the chief European victors in the Great War.

As they recuperate the African danger will increase. Africa, next after Eastern Europe and the Near East, is likely to become in the course of a dozen years or so the chief danger region of the world.

It behooves all those who are dreaming of an organized world peace through an Association of Nations to keep this African rock ahead in mind and to think out the possible method of linking this great region with the rest of the world in a universal peace scheme.

I submit that it is not premature for those who are concerned with the future of our race to consider the necessity of three chief things:

(1) The complete abandonment and prohibition now of the enlistment and military use of the African native population.

(2) The application of the principle of the “open door” and equal trading opportunities for all comers in the regions between the Sahara and the Zambesi.

(3) A more organized care of the native African population by a tightening up of the existing restrictions upon the arms and drink trades and the development of some sort of elementary education throughout Africa that will give these very various and largely still untried peoples a chance of showing what latent abilities they have for self-government and participation in the general human common weal.

For my own part, it seems to me that any real “League of Nations,” any effective “Association of Nations,” must necessarily supersede the existing “empires” and imperial systems and take over their alien “possessions” and that one commission embodying the collective will of all the efficient civilized nations of the world is the only practicable form of security for all those parts of Africa incapable or not yet capable of self-government.