should look upon this conscripting and removal to distant countries of their young men in the light of the revival of the slave trade. It is the revival of the slave trade. The men are taken by force; must be taken by force, either through the instrumentality of native troops under French officers, or through the instrumentality of their own chiefs acting under French orders. True, once secured, they are not sent to work in plantations; they are not lashed and kicked and tortured. They are sent to camps where they are taught to kill men—black men in Africa, white men in Europe; they are well fed and indulged. All the same they are slaves in every moral sense.
There is the issue of white government in Africa. The French example cannot fail to be imitated by other Powers with African possessions. Nothing is more certain than that British militarists will want to impose conscription upon the native peoples in the British Protectorates. And from their point of view they will be right. Reasons other than purely military ones will be evoked, and it will be difficult to oppose them. Should we be justified in leaving the hard-working, industrious, progressive native communities, of Nigeria, surrounded on three sides by French possessions, at the mercy of a Power which could invade the country at any moment with a force of 50,000 first-class fighting black troops? Alliances are not eternal. Again, can we run the risk of leaving Nigeria open to the invasion by a French native army in rebellion against its French officers? Such a rebellion is only a matter of time. What could a handful of French officers and administrators do against tens of thousands of black troops thoroughly inured to scientific warfare, and many of them having opposed trained white troops on European battlefields—"blooded" with white blood! The white man has dug the grave of the "prestige" of his race in West Africa, by employing West Africans to kill white men in Europe, and by stationing them in European cities where they have raped white women. In applying conscription not only to French West Africa proper, but south of the Equator to the Congo forest region, the French are virtually compelling the Belgians to do the same in their neighbouring Congo. The spirit of the Leopoldian régime is not so dead that the measure would
