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THE WORLD PROBLEM OF COLOUR

South Africa. By W. H. DAWSON. Longmans, Green. 1925

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HE coloured races throughout the world outnumber the white by more than two to one, and within this far-flung empire of ours the proportion is more than seven to one. For none, therefore, should the tremendous problem of the future relations between the white and the coloured races provide a more poignant subject of reflection than for Englishmen. Yet the stay-at-home Englishman living at the nerve-centre of the Empire, often priding himself on "thinking imperially," seems rarely to be conscious that on the solution of the colour problem depends in a large measure not only the preservation of the Empire and of Western civilisation itself, but even his own material existence.

The average Englishman probably seldom stops to think how much of the food he consumes, how many of the raw materials for the clothes he wears and for the commonest articles he uses, come from far-away lands which the white man's enterprise has opened up, but which the labour of coloured peoples can alone develop. He has not imagination enough to visualise with Mr. Basil Mathews, in his vivid " Clash of Colour," the millions of humble toilers, brown or yellow or black, who in Asia and in Africa and in the islands of the southern seas are, year in, year out, employed in growing tea, coffee, cocoa and sugar for the Englishman's breakfast table; cotton, flax and silk for his raiment ; rubber for the tyres, whether of modest push-bike or of opulent Rolls Royce; or in extracting from the bowels of the earth not only gold and silver but many, if not most, of the other metals essential to the countless processes of modern manufacture. He does not ask himself what would happen to the complicated and delicately balanced machinery of England's material life if the coloured races should eventually cease to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water for the white man all the world over, who is content to assume that this is their proper and immutable function. The very question sounds to him an absurd one, for he has to-day so vast a superiority of knowledge of organization and of equipment, and he has to put it brutally-so much better a grip of

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"the big stick," that a successful revolt of the coloured races seems to lie beyond the range of all the human possibilities with which he need concern himself.

But, is that so? Or how long will it be so? The coloured races differ widely in their respective stages of social, political, and religious, as well as of economic evolution; but one feature they all have in common. Throughout them all there runs to-day a strong current of revolt against the white man's claim to supremacy: a current, indeed, so strong that, wherever the white man comes in direct contact with it, he is himself already manifesting a profound sense of alarm. These phenomena assume different shapes in different parts of the world, but racialism is their common denominator. Amongst the brown and yellow races that have preserved great civilisations of their own, and are by no means our inferiors in brain-power or, indeed, in any of the higher natural faculties, the revolt is partly a reaction against the forceful impact of the white man's civilisation, and partly the result of Western education which has taught them to use for their own purposes the intellectual, political and material equipment they have received from the West.

The Japanese nation, torn by the Western nations less than three-quarters of a century ago out of the self-imposed isolation of two hundred years, was the first to resolve that, if it were forced into the rough and tumble of the modern world, it would be hammer rather than anvil; and it has successfully asserted its claim to rank, without discrimination of colour, on the same level with the great Powers that represent the white races. To what effective uses Japan will ultimately turn the peculiar position she has achieved for herself it is too early to predict, but her example has already had momentous effects. We have witnessed them in India, ever since the defeat of a great European Power by Japan sent an unprecedented thrill of Asiatic pride through all the Indian peoples and quickened their newly conceived aspirations-based largely on Western lessons of freedomtowards a common and independent nationhood, free from the white man's domination.

In China also we are witnessing to-day in a cruder shape the effects both of the Japanese example and of the constant, though much slower, infiltration of Western ideas. Unlike the Japanese, the Chinese people were content for a long time to drape themselves haughtily in the consciousness of an ancient civilisation

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which they held to be vastly superior to that of the West, whilst leaving the Western nations to establish their own economic imperium in imperio in the " ports "-some of them many hundreds of miles from the sea-thrown open," at first almost contemptuously, to foreign trade and settlement. It was Japan herself who first exploded the myth of China's "latent power in the war of 1894-95. Since then, through the Boxer movement of 1900, the Chinese revolution of 1910, the military strife and governmental chaos of the present day, China has been groping her way towards some readjustment of her national forces of resistance to the white man's ascendancy, and to-day she is ready to welcome even Russian Bolshevism as an ally against Western civilisation.

In the Arab countries of Asia and Africa the racial issue is surcharged with the ancient religious fanaticism of Islam, quite as much as with the new-born nationalism of the Arab peoples, unconsciously encouraged by the Western nations themselves during the Great War. In India, too, was felt the repercussion of the Arab movement in its Islamic aspect during the Caliphate agitation, which was formidable enough to deflect British policy from one of its principal and most legitimate war aims in regard to Turkey, then still acclaimed as the sword of Islam against the infidel no less than as the protagonist of Asia against Europe. Earlier still, before peace had been actually signed at Versailles, two great and sudden risings of Arab and Mohammedan peoples took place against British authority in Egypt and in Iraq. This year has produced two not less violent explosions in Northern Morocco and in Syria, which demonstrate amongst other things how vastly more difficult a task it is to-day than in former times for the white man to enforce his ascendancy by the sheer weight of superior armaments and organization, and how dangerous may become the risks taken by Western nations like Great Britain and France, who themselves train and equip large coloured armies to relieve the cost and strain of military service on their own white populations.

In the French and Italian possessions along the southern shores of the Mediterranean, in Egypt, in Palestine and in Iraq the signs. of Arab restlessness, though temporarily driven beneath the surface, are still constantly apparent. And almost everywhere the sanction of Islam is in the background, while in the foreground is the principle of self-determination which the West has taught the East to invoke.

This rising tide has been helped along not infrequently by the rival ambitions of the Western nations, and still more by their exhaustion in a war which to the coloured races seemed to spell the bankruptcy of Western civilisation. At the same time the white man-chastened may be by adversity, and inspired, one may hope, by a new idealism wrung out of the horrors of warhas spontaneously yielded a good deal of ground, some wisely and some with perhaps premature haste, in his political relations with the brown and yellow peoples. After the downfall of Tzarist Russia there was none to contest Japan's admittance to complete equality, and she sat amongst the "Big Five " at the Paris Peace Conference. Even China can now exact an unwontedly deferential hearing in spite of the persistent anarchy which in other days would have been held to call for a “gunboat policy." An international conference is now in consultation with an unstable government of the Chinese Republic to consider what concessions must be made to a national sentiment in fierce revolt against the restraints hitherto imposed on China's fiscal independence and territorial rights of sovereignty.

Turkey, after having lost the Great War, has won from Allied dissensions and the Greek débâcle a peace which has allowed her to root out every alien element from her soil and to destroy the large Greek population that preserved at least the memory of an Hellenic culture infinitely older than that of the Turk. Persia, with the withdrawal of the treaty by which Lord Curzon sought to revive British ascendancy, has recovered the political independence which the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 had reduced to little more than a diplomatic fiction. Afghanistan has shaken off even the slight restrictions which the Government of India had imposed, at the cost of three arduous wars, on the Ameer's relations with other foreign Powers. Egypt, released by the war from the shadow of Turkish suzerainty, has secured the discontinuance of close British control and the hasty recognition of her status as a sovereign and independent State. In North Africa the French and the Spaniards are still engaged in a protracted campaign against the Riffs, but both have intimated to Abdul Krim their readiness to make peace on any reasonable terms that will not involve the surrender of their essential interests or of the Moorish Sultan's titular overlordship. In Syria, the appointment of M. de Jouvenel should herald the return of French

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policy to saner methods than General Sarrail's, for the new High Commissioner is known to be one of the most convinced believers in the saving influence of the League of Nations; and if, as experience has recently shown at Locarno, it is in the growing influence of the League that lies the best hope of restoring peace to a distraught Europe, it is there also that lies the best hope of averting disastrous conflicts with the coloured races, no longer willing to recognise the white man's claim to world-supremacy.

The League has opened its doors to all alike, and already Persia, Siam and China no less than Japan amongst Asiatic nations, and the negro States of Haiti and Liberia, have been admitted to full partnership.

No less valuable is the Covenant which governs the relations between the "advanced nations " and the more backward peoples th whose destinies had been directly affected by the Great War. The principles laid down only apply specifically to colonies and territories in which an actual change of sovereignty took place under the Peace Treaties, but they lend themselves to the widest application. For they substitute for the old practice of annexation with unrestricted rights of sovereignty, and for the establishment of Protectorates, differing little from actual annexation, a mandatory authority over territories in alien occupation, to be exercised only by whatever nations may be entrusted with it, under regular supervision by and direct responsibility to the League. It is still a system of tutelage, but a transitional system intended for " peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world," and only until such times as they shall have developed the capacity required to govern and defend themselves.

Englishmen may well claim that the principle embodied in Art. XII of the Covenant, which describes a mandate as "a sacred trust of civilisation," is identical with that which Burke first enunciated nearly a century and a-half ago, when he described the governance of India as a trust to be discharged by vesting in the British Parliament the control of the East India Company that was just then being transformed from a mere trading corporation into the ruling power in India. It is no mere coincidence that the Great War, which gave birth to the League of Nations, should have led also to a signal development of this principle of trusteeship in India for the expressed purpose of lifting her peoples on to a

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