of securing international sanction for a right policy in tropical Africa are great enough in all conscience. Why add to them a procedure which bristles with constitutional, legal and sentimental obstacles?
What is really needed is that certain definite principles by which administrative policy in tropical Africa should be guided, be worked out and laid down at an international Conference; and that this policy should have behind it the sanction of a real League of Nations, and the moral support of public opinion.
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I return to my original question. What could a League of Nations do to protect the peoples of tropical Africa from the evils of capitalistic exploitation and militarism?
So far as the militarisation of the African tropics is concerned, a League inspired by the purpose above mentioned, would recognise that anything short of cauterising the evil at its root was useless. So long as Europe persists in treating tropical Africa as a potential war zone, liable to be involved at any moment in European quarrels, and so long as France persists in treating her African dependencies as a reservoir of black cannon-fodder, the militarisation of the country is inevitable, and the conscription of its adult male population is bound to follow everywhere.
There is but one remedy: the exclusion of tropical Africa from the area of European conflict by international agreement. This can be accomplished only in one way. Tropical Africa should be placed under perpetual neutrality. It is, of course, perfectly true that its neutrality might be violated. But that applies to any provision enunciated by the League. The whole conception of a League of Nations is the subordination of selfish national interests to the major international interest. If the sanction of the League were obtained for the neutralisation of the African tropics, we should have the collective moral forces of civilisation arrayed in opposition to the Power, or Powers, which sought to infringe that neutrality: and there is no force carrying greater weight which humanity at its present stage of ethical development can invoke. If civilisation is incapable of rising, to the height of a self-denying ordinance affecting
