on behalf of enterprises which make for the exploitation and impoverishment of the native population. The welfare of the natives is subordinated to the exigencies of the alien capitalist. The evil must be attacked, nationally and internationally, without cessation.
But there is special need to impress upon those who are already won over to the moral side of the question, or whose traditions and outlook would naturally induce them to take that side, that the attack will not be successful in the ultimate resort if it confines itself merely to insistence upon the moral issue. It must face the economic issue. It must form a clear conception of what is sound, and what is unsound in the methods of economic development in these regions. It must persuade by economic reasoning as well as by appeals to ethical and humanitarian instincts and motives. It must be in a position to demonstrate that what is morally right is also economically sound; that what is morally wrong is also economically unsound. It must seek to convince the public mind that the economic purpose of Europe in tropical Africa is served by the individual and collective prosperity of the native population, not by its impoverishment; by the existence of native communities of agriculturists and abori-culturists producing for their own profit, not for the benefit of the shareholders of white syndicates and concessionaires. It must be at great pains to show that the policy of encouraging forms of European enterprise which convert African labour into a dividend-producing force for the individual European, is sheer economic waste of the potentialities of African labour: whereas the full potentialities of African labour can be secured for the economic purpose of Europe by encouraging forms of European enterprise in which the African figures, not as a hired servant, but as co-operator and partner.
The task is not an easy one, because all the tendencies of our European capitalist system incline to make the test of "prosperity" of a tropical African territory depend upon the number of European enterprises therein established which are acquiring profits out of the direct employment of African labour. And curiously enough there is a type of European Socialist mind that unconsciously reinforces these tendencies, of course from an entirely different standpoint. This type of mind visualises the mass of African humanity in terms of a dogmatic economic theory.
