but upon examination these are seen to lead to the same common centre. Divorce the African communities from the land, and you reduce the units composing them to the level of wage slaves. You thereby reproduce in Africa all the vices which lie at the base of social unrest in civilised States. But you reproduce them in infinitely aggravated form. The white proletariat in the mass can never attain to true economic independence until it has won back the rights of the common people to the soil. But it can live, and even prosper, because owing to the improvements in transport, labour-saving appliances and a network of trade relations, it can be fed through external sources. But the prosperity of African communities wholly depends upon the use of their, soil, and by robbing them of the soil you deprive them of the means of life.
Again, the existing land system of a large part of Europe ia a system which has evolved internally by gradual processes, and which internal action can modify, or abrogate altogether. The matter can be solved by the citizens of the State: it is a question for the latter of the conquest of political power, either by revolutionary or evolutionary means. But for an alien race to deprive African peoples of the land, is to strike at the foundations of human liberties, to disrupt the whole conditions of life, and to impose from outside a servitude only maintainable by the constant exercise of brute force. The revolutionary movement sweeping through Europe has various precipitating causes, and responds to mixed and, apparently conflicting motives. Fundamentally it is, consciously and unconsciously, an impulse of the mass of the people to win back the land, the pivot of their economic and human liberties, the nursing-mother of man. Is it precisely at this stage in the evolution of the white races, that the European ruling clashes are to be allowed to reproduce in Africa the confiscatory and monopolistic policy, which for centuries has maintained the peoples of Europe in a condition of economic servitude?
This, then, is the first pre-requisite to the performance of the duties of trusteeship towards the African peoples, that the latter must be guaranteed in the possession of the soil and the enjoyment of its fruits.
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