can mean only one thing: a tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands. Remember that these homelands are already populated up to the available limits of subsistence. Of course present limits can in many cases be pushed back by better living conditions, improved agriculture, and the rise of modern machine industry such as is already under way in Japan. Nevertheless, in view of the tremendous population increases which must occur, these can be only palliatives. Where, then, should the congested colored world tend to pour its accumulating human surplus, inexorably condemned to emigrate or starve? The answer is: into those emptier regions of the earth under white political control. But many of these relatively empty lands have been definitely set aside by the white man as his own special heritage. The upshot is that the rising flood of color finds itself walled in by white dikes debarring it from many a promised land which it would fain deluge with its dusky waves.

Thus the colored world, long restive under white political domination, is being welded by the most fundamental of instincts, the instinct of self-preservation, into a common solidarity of feeling against the dominant white man, and in the fire of a common purpose internecine differences tend, for the time at least, to be burned away. Before the supreme fact of white political world-domination, antipathies within the colored world must inevitably recede into the background.

The imperious urge of the colored world toward racial expansion was well visualized by that keen English student of world affairs, Doctor E. J. Dillon, when he wrote more than a decade ago: “The problem is one of life and death—a veritable sphinx-question—to those most nearly concerned. For, no race, however inferior it may be, will consent to famish slowly in order that other people may fatten and take their ease, especially if it has a good chance to make a fight for life.”[1]

This white statement of the colored thesis is an accurate reflection of what colored men say themselves. For example, a Japanese scholar, Professor Ryutaro Nagai, writes: “The world was not made for the white races, but for the other races as well. In Australia, South Africa, Canada, and the United States, there are vast tracts of unoccupied territory awaiting settlement, and although the citizens of the ruling Powers refuse to take up the land, no yellow people are permitted to enter. Thus the white races seem ready to commit to the savage birds and beasts what they refuse to intrust to their brethren of the yellow race. Surely the arrogance and avarice of the nobility in apportioning to themselves the most and the best of the land in certain countries is as nothing compared with the attitude of the white races toward those of a different hue.”[2]

The bitter resentment of white predominance and exclusiveness awakened in many colored breasts is typified by the following lines penned by a brown man, a British-educated Afghan, shortly before the European War. Inveighing against our “racial prejudice, that cowardly, wretched caste-mark of the European and the American the world over,” he exultantly predicts “a coming struggle between Asia, all Asia, against Europe and America. You are heaping up material for a Jehad, a Pan-Islam, a Pan-Asia Holy War, a gigantic day of reckoning, an invasion of a new Attila and Tamerlane—who will use rifles and bullets, instead of lances and spears. You are deaf to the voice of reason and fairness, and so you must be taught with the whirring swish of the sword when it is red.”[3]

Of course in these statements there is nothing either exceptional or novel. The colored races never welcomed white predominance and were always restive under white control. Down to the close of the nineteenth century, however, they generally accepted white hegemony as a disagreeable but inevitable fact. For four hundred years the white man had added continent to continent in his imperial progress, equipped with resistless sea-power and armed with a mechanical superiority that crushed down all local efforts at resistance. In time, therefore, the colored races accorded to white supremacy a fatalistic acquiescence, and, though never loved, the white man was usually respected and universally feared.

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, to be sure, premonitory signs of a change in attitude began to appear. The yellow and brown races, at least, stirred by the very impact of Western ideas, measured the white man with a more critical eye and commenced to wonder whether his superiority was due to anything more than a fortuitous combination of circumstances which might be altered by efforts of their own. Japan put this theory to the test by going sedulously to the white man’s school. The upshot was the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, an event the momentous character of which is even now not fully appreciated. Of course, that war was merely the sign-manual of a whole nexus of forces making for a revivified Asia. But it dramatized and clarified ideas which had been germinating half-unconsciously in millions of colored minds, and both Asia and Africa thrilled with joy and hope. Above all, the legend of white invincibility lay, a fallen idol, in the dust. Nevertheless, though freed from imaginary terrors, the colored world accurately gauged the white man’s practical strength and appreciated the magnitude of the task involved in overthrowing white supremacy. That supremacy was no longer acquiesced in as inevitable and hopes of ultimate success were confidently entertained, but the process was usually conceived as a slow and difficult one. Fear of white power and respect for white civilization thus remained potent restraining factors.

Then came the Great War. The colored world suddenly saw the white peoples which, in racial matters had hitherto maintained something of a united front, locked in an internecine death-grapple of unparalleled ferocity; it saw those same peoples put one another furiously to the ban as irreconcilable foes; it saw white race-unity cleft by political and moral gulfs which white men themselves continuously iterated would never be filled. As colored men realized the significance of it all, they looked into each other’s eyes and there saw the light of undreamed-of hopes. The white world was tearing itself to pieces. White solidarity was riven and shattered. And—fear of white power and respect for white civilization together dropped away like garments outworn. Through the bazaars of Asia ran the sibilant whisper: “The East will see the West to bed!”

The chorus of mingled exultation, hate, and scorn sounded from every portion of the colored world. Chinese scholars, Japanese professors, Hindu pundits, Turkish journalists, and Afro-American editors, one and all voiced drastic criticisms of white civilization and hailed the war as a well-merited Nemesis on white arrogance and greed. This is how the Constantinople Tanine, the most serious Turkish newspaper, characterized the European Powers: “They would not look at the evils in their own countries or elsewhere, but interfered at the slightest incident in our borders; every day they would gnaw at some part of our rights and our sovereignty; they would perform