of the facts of the universe is far behind modern knowledge. That comfort is necessary to complete human happiness, who can for a moment doubt? But what shall the world pay for this completeness—what is it paying now? First of all, it has in the heyday of its triumph been able or willing to supply comfort but to a minority of its own population. The majority of the whole people of Europe have poor food, inadequate clothing, bad shelter, inadequate amusement and misleading education. They are more comfortable than the African savages only in their water supply, their foods and their opportunity to look at brilliantly lighted streets.
To save then this efficient organization of work, this synchronization of human industrial effort the like of which the world never before saw—to save this, and led by the idea that at all hazards it must be saved, white Western Europe has long been united in a determination to make the colored worlds contribute to its comfort, subordinate themselves to its interests, become part of its machine. It argues that on this path alone lies salvation for the lazy South and the sleepy East; that upon them lies the salvation of the world; and they ignore with perfect ignorance the possibility that lazy enjoyment and silent contemplation of life, without a surplus or even a sufficiency of modern comfort may for a moment be held an end and ideal of existence; or that the efficient West and North can learn of the lazy South and sleepy East.
If now the world, and particularly the laboring world, should come to realize that industrial efficiency as measured by the amount of goods made and the size of the private profit derived therefrom is not the greatest thing in the world, and that by exchanging European efficiency for African leisure and Asiatic contemplation they might gain tremendously in happiness, the world might be less afraid to give up economic imperialism. Moreover, future economic imperialism can only be held together by militarism. Militarism is costly and to increasing masses of men since the Great War, hateful; more than this—the darker world is held in subjection to Europe by its own darker soldiers. Africa is owned and held almost entirely by Europe; but at the same time Africa is held and kept in
