Part 4 (1/2)
Let me say this again and emphasize it and leave no room for mistaken meaning: The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races. As such it is and must be but the prelude to the armed and indignant protest of these despised and raped peoples. Today j.a.pan is hammering on the door of justice, China is raising her half-manacled hands to knock next, India is writhing for the freedom to knock, Egypt is sullenly muttering, the Negroes of South and West Africa, of the West Indies, and of the United States are just awakening to their shameful slavery. Is, then, this war the end of wars? Can it be the end, so long as sits enthroned, even in the souls of those who cry peace, the despising and robbing of darker peoples? If Europe hugs this delusion, then this is not the end of world war,--it is but the beginning!
We see Europe's greatest sin precisely where we found Africa's and Asia's,--in human hatred, the despising of men; with this difference, however: Europe has the awful lesson of the past before her, has the splendid results of widened areas of tolerance, sympathy, and love among men, and she faces a greater, an infinitely greater, world of men than any preceding civilization ever faced.
It is curious to see America, the United States, looking on herself, first, as a sort of natural peacemaker, then as a moral protagonist in this terrible time. No nation is less fitted for this role. For two or more centuries America has marched proudly in the van of human hatred,--making bonfires of human flesh and laughing at them hideously, and making the insulting of millions more than a matter of dislike,--rather a great religion, a world war-cry: Up white, down black; to your tents, O white folk, and world war with black and parti-colored mongrel beasts!
Instead of standing as a great example of the success of democracy and the possibility of human brotherhood America has taken her place as an awful example of its pitfalls and failures, so far as black and brown and yellow peoples are concerned. And this, too, in spite of the fact that there has been no actual failure; the Indian is not dying out, the j.a.panese and Chinese have not menaced the land, and the experiment of Negro suffrage has resulted in the uplift of twelve million people at a rate probably unparalleled in history. But what of this? America, Land of Democracy, wanted to believe in the failure of democracy so far as darker peoples were concerned. Absolutely without excuse she established a caste system, rushed into preparation for war, and conquered tropical colonies. She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe in Europe's worst sin against civilization. She aspires to sit among the great nations who arbitrate the fate of ”lesser breeds without the law” and she is at times heartily ashamed even of the large number of ”new” white people whom her democracy has admitted to place and power. Against this surging forward of Irish and German, of Russian Jew, Slav and ”dago” her social bars have not availed, but against Negroes she can and does take her unflinching and immovable stand, backed by this new public policy of Europe. She trains her immigrants to this despising of ”n.i.g.g.e.rs” from the day of their landing, and they carry and send the news back to the submerged cla.s.ses in the fatherlands.
All this I see and hear up in my tower, above the thunder of the seven seas. From my narrowed windows I stare into the night that looms beneath the cloud-swept stars. Eastward and westward storms are breaking,--great, ugly whirlwinds of hatred and blood and cruelty. I will not believe them inevitable. I will not believe that all that was must be, that all the shameful drama of the past must be done again today before the sunlight sweeps the silver seas.
If I cry amid this roar of elemental forces, must my cry be in vain, because it is but a cry,--a small and human cry amid Promethean gloom?
Back beyond the world and swept by these wild, white faces of the awful dead, why will this Soul of White Folk,--this modern Prometheus,--hang bound by his own binding, tethered by a fable of the past? I hear his mighty cry reverberating through the world, ”I am white!” Well and good, O Prometheus, divine thief! Is not the world wide enough for two colors, for many little s.h.i.+nings of the sun? Why, then, devour your own vitals if I answer even as proudly, ”I am black!”
_The Riddle of the Sphinx_
Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern Sea!
Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free!
The muttered music of thy streams, the whisper of the deep, Have kissed each other in G.o.d's name and kissed a world to sleep.
The will of the world is a whistling wind, sweeping a cloud-swept sky, And not from the East and not from the West knelled that soul-waking cry, But out of the South,--the sad, black South--it screamed from the top of the sky, Crying: ”Awake, O ancient race!” Wailing, ”O woman, arise!”
And crying and sighing and crying again as a voice in the midnight cries,-- But the burden of white men bore her back and the white world stifled her sighs.
The white world's vermin and filth: All the dirt of London, All the sc.u.m of New York; Valiant spoilers of women And conquerers of unarmed men; Shameless breeders of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, Drunk with the greed of gold, Baiting their blood-stained hooks With cant for the souls of the simple; Bearing the white man's burden Of liquor and l.u.s.t and lies!
Unthankful we wince in the East, Unthankful we wail from the westward, Unthankfully thankful, we curse, In the unworn wastes of the wild: I hate them, Oh!
I hate them well, I hate them, Christ!
As I hate h.e.l.l!
If I were G.o.d, I'd sound their knell This day!
Who raised the fools to their glory, But black men of Egypt and Ind, Ethiopia's sons of the evening, Indians and yellow Chinese, Arabian children of morning, And mongrels of Rome and Greece?
Ah, well!
And they that raised the boasters Shall drag them down again,-- Down with the theft of their thieving And murder and mocking of men; Down with their barter of women And laying and lying of creeds; Down with their cheating of childhood And drunken orgies of war,-- down down deep down, Till the devil's strength be shorn, Till some dim, darker David, a-hoeing of his corn, And married maiden, mother of G.o.d, Bid the black Christ be born!
Then shall our burden be manhood, Be it yellow or black or white; And poverty and justice and sorrow, The humble, and simple and strong Shall sing with the sons of morning And daughters of even-song: Black mother of the iron hills that ward the blazing sea, Wild spirit of a storm-swept soul, a-struggling to be free, Where 'neath the b.l.o.o.d.y finger-marks thy riven bosom quakes, Thicken the thunders of G.o.d's Voice and lo! a world awakes!
III
THE HANDS OF ETHIOPIA
”_Semper novi quid ex Africa_,” cried the Roman proconsul, and he voiced the verdict of forty centuries. Yet there are those who would write world history and leave out of account this most marvelous of continents. Particularly today most men a.s.sume that Africa is far afield from the center of our burning social problems and especially from our problem of world war.
Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing. On its black bosom arose one of the earliest, if not the earliest, of self-protecting civilizations, which grew so mightily that it still furnishes superlatives to thinking and speaking men. Out of its darker and more remote forest fastnesses came, if we may credit many recent scientists, the first welding of iron, and we know that agriculture and trade flourished there when Europe was a wilderness.