Page:Morel-The Black Mans Burden.djvu/253

 It would stand aside from any effort to preserve the native races from capitalistic exploitation, which it regards as a necessary and inevitable episode in human development. It would do nothing to safeguard native institutions, which it looks upon as archaic and reactionary. It would apply the same processes to all races (it refuses, apparently, to admit any other form of civilisation than the European socialised State) at whatever stage of cultural development. It would cheerfully, and with the purest of motives, assist at the destruction of African institutions, and assent to the conversion of African cultivators and farmers into wage-slaves, sublimely indifferent to the social havoc and misery thereby inflicted upon millions of living Africans and Africans yet unborn, content witVi the thought that in the fullness of time the wage-slaves would themselves evolve the Socialist African State. The only comment that I would venture to make upon the contentions of this school, is that the form of Socialism which Russia has evolved, and which, I suppose, is the most advanced form of European Socialism now available to study, approximates closely to the social conditions of an advanced tropical African community. The spinal column of both is a system of land tenure which ensures to the population a large measure of economic independence—in tropical Africa the degree of economic independence is necessarily greater; while the corporate character which the Soviet system imparts to all economic activities is substantially identical with the African social system. It seems a strange anomaly to laud advanced Socialism in Europe, and to assent to its destruction in tropical Africa.

The ordinary business man's view of "prosperity" in relation to an African dependency, referred to above, is thoroughly fallacious. The true prosperity of a tropical African dependency is to be judged by altogether different standards, even from the standpoint we are now examining, that of Europe's utilitarian purpose in this part of the world. Flourishing towns and villages surrounded by well-kept fields, plantations and live stock (you may see thousands such in Nigeria): a happy and expanding population, self-supporting in the matter of foodstuffs, carrying on a brisk trade with its neighbours, cultivating products for export, becoming steadily wealthier, and in consequence—and here the European