Round about the Congo

...The citadel and justification of Franco-British imperialism lies in the great, dark and wealthy continent of Africa...

...The continent of Livingstone and Stanley, of Gordon and Kitchener, of Cecil Rhodes and General Smuts, is now the great reservoir of raw materials and the training school of statesmen that British India was during the first seventy-five years of the nineteenth century...

...It is the Cadbury and other British cocoa interests which profit by the cocoa plantations of the gold coast...

...In Abyssinia an American engineering corporation-J...

...Occasional frontier markets, as in South Africa today, East Africa tomorrow and Abyssinia the day after tomorrow, may be able to purchase a considerable volume of our more characteristic national products...

...In the union of South Africa the nationalist government is faced with an ugly race and labor situation arising out of the control of the country by a white planter and poor-white minority in the face of a growing black majority...

...For a non-European nation to acquire strategic or political footholds in Africa would send a political shudder through the chanceries of Europe...

...The Suez Canal, built by French capital and skill, controlled by British states-manship and sea power, Egypt, the Sudan, East Africa with its high plateaus and its plantations, the Rho-desias, the Anglo-Dutch dominion of South Africa, the chain of British colonies up the west coast, including the Gold Coast and the vast domain of Nigeria- this is the last stronghold of the imperialism which Kipling preached and Disraeli practised...

...This is in keeping with what may be termed the European Monroe Doctrine...

...As may be imagined, these opportunities are slight as compared to those which the colonial powers themselves enjoy, and they have been achieved only in the face of determined opposition...

...Economically and politically, North Africa is more a part of Europe than are Mexico, the Caribbean and Central American countries parts of North America...

...The Firestone project in Liberia was only acquired after protracted and painful negotiations, in the face of British and French scepticism and of the customary liberal disapprobation in the United States...

...As in Europe and to a lesser extent in South America, France and Great Britain are masters and beneficiaries of the status quo in Africa...

...An additional reason for such caution is the precarious color problem which is arising to challenge white European control...

...On the northwest corner of the continent, also, we have a foothold in Morocco where the equality of commercial opportunity assured us by the Act of Algeciras of 1906 has been barely maintained against the steady pressure from the authorities of the French protectorate, who have striven for over a decade to convert the country into a sphere of economic as well as political influence...

...In the union of South Africa we have made no move whatsoever to attempt to widen the breach in the British preferential system which the German treaty made...

...British statesmanship for generations has bent itself to the task of painting as much of Africa as possible as red as possible...

...France and Great Britain have largely created modern Africa...

...We cannot afford to neglect Africa and if we try to cultivate Africa we find the continent neatly parceled out among a handful of European countries...

...The Leverhulme soap interests profit from the palm oil of the west coast...

...In the meantime, South Africa will provide us with a constantly expanding market for our frontier products-mining machinery, automotives, tractors, agricultural machinery, lubricants, gasoline and the other mechanical devices which we have found most practical in opening up a new country...

...The commercial equality guaranteed by the Act of Alegeciras to American trade has been greatly circumscribed in both the Spanish and the French zones of the Shereefian empire...

...A certain amount of administrative and technical discrimination is inevitable...

...But the great independent trading companies which handle the bulk of the west African trade have been as willing to stock American goods as any other, provided there was a demand for them...

...What we shall seek in the Africa of the future is not so much a market for our manufactures as adequate sources of necessary tropical raw materials and minerals...

...It is true that there are Belgian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish colonies all the way around the clock from Djibouti to Casablanca, Leopoldville and Delagoa Bay...

...You must understand the London fogs and the London clubs to prosper in Nigeria...

...For Japan or the United States to express an interest- even a polite interest-in the territorial distribution of the African world would do more to promote European political solidarity than all the economic conferences in the world...

...It is symptomatic of the difficulties which we must overcome that the only footholds American interests have been able to obtain have been in independent and semi-independent countries...

...The French have endeavored to solve the racial problem by a strictly egalitarian policy which has attained a political success, but which is powerless to deal with the major issue of exploitation of native labor...

...It is for the mills of Lancashire that cotton and irrigation developments are being promoted in Nigeria and the Sudan...

...Similarly, French interests very naturally receive the insider's slice of the profits to be made in French African possessions...

...American capital has freely participated in British mining ventures in South Africa...

...Our very mild and natural interest in the Liberian republic, which we established for our freed slaves a century ago, has occasioned diplomatic curiosity, if no more, at Paris and London...

...It is necessary to appreciate this if America is ever going to participate in the era of economic development which is dawning for Africa...

...Anything which suggested a desire to alienate any part of Africa from the snug control of the European rulers would be fatal to any hope we may entertain of developing closer economic relations with that continent...

...Unless we are prepared to acknowledge their primacy in the dark continent and to recognize the magnitude of their colonizing achievements, we shall find our efforts to cultivate trade with Africa are in vain...

...In the Natal and in East Africa, to the Negro problem is added the desire of the white planters to obtain labor at all costs and a growing impatience in India at the British policy which excludes British Indian subjects from British East Africa...

...France, on the other hand, in keeping with the spirit of her people and institutions, has been more rigidly exclusive, and with the fresh economic financial and political power which she acquired from the war this tendency will doubtless be accentuated...

...The basic problem which we face in Africa is to secure and maintain the open door without challenging Europe's "Monroe Doctrine" which preserves the dark continent as the political appanage of the old world...

...The two empires are so inextricably intertwined all over the African map that they must, willy-nilly, stand together...

...Africa itself is very largely an economic future...

...G. White Company of New York City-have obtained the contract for the big Lake Tsana (Blue Nile Dam) on which hangs the future of British irrigation projects in the Sudan...

...The result will be that France alone will enjoy an open door in her African colonies and that the French will be the most vigorous opponents of American economic expansion in Africa...

...All this is to be expected...

...The British have given us a fair break on the trade...

...Africa contains boundless agricultural wealth, huge stores of gold, copper and other metals, it contains the world's greatest store of undeveloped water power and is the most valuable and logical of Europe's colonial and economic appendages...

...International conventions have assured practical equality of trade in the Congo and in the lucrative markets of the west African coast...

...Now, Africa is rich...

...Africa is Europe's colony par excellence...

...The future of our trade with Africa is an entirely different matter...

...On the whole, however, our chief interest will lie in securing a fair opportunity for trade and fair treatment for such isolated ventures as the Firestone plantations which ignore the "no trespassing" signs and set up shop in Europe's economic bailiwick...

...In north and northwest Africa France has a magnificent empire-Tunis, Algiers, the protectorate of Morocco, the Camerons, the French Congo, the central plateau of northern Africa, with footholds on the Red Sea and the great island of Madagascar to keep the tricolor flying on the east coast...

...Elsewhere, the new independence of Egypt has been followed by a brisk growth of American-Egyptian trade, and in South Africa there is opportunity for trade relations as favorable as those enjoyed by the united kingdom...

...If we were ready to fight England over the Venezuela incident more than thirty years ago, what would Europe feel if we suddenly challenged, let us say, the sultan of Morocco whom France controls, or if we suddenly proclaimed that Abyssinia had signed a treaty of protectorate with Washington...

...France has devoted a very considerable portion of German reparation payment to improving the economic equipment of her possessions...

...But the whip hand is held by Paris and London, which can jointly veto or authorize any shift in the status quo...

...That, at any rate, is the logic of the situation created by the recent German-South African treaty which gives to German goods most-favored-nation treatment, including the benefit of preferential rates which may be accorded to the united kingdom...

...So far, we have had little to complain of...

...In Liberia the Firestone interests have obtained a concession of 1,000,000 acres for the growing of rubber which will render us partially independent of the British-Dutch monoply...

...The African situation is already sufficiently complicated by political, economic and racial factors to make us exceedingly wary in pushing our commercial interests at the expense of the status quo...

...Our trade with the entire continent is an insignificant fraction of our trade with the world and distinctly less than our trade with any one of half a dozen countries...

...The union of South Africa, despite its biracial government and its rising nationalism, has seen its mineral wealth of gold, diamonds, vanadium and copper become the private preserve for the London financiers who stood behind the Boer War...

...The only independent African nations are the republic of Liberia, just below the tip of the bulge of west Africa, and the empire of Abyssinia, wedged in the northeast corner of the continent between the Sudanese deserts and the harsh Somali and Red Sea coasts...

...We ourselves handle the great bulk of the foreign trade of the Philippines despite their distance from our chief markets and their proximity to those of Asia...

...We have exchanged ministers with the union and shall doubtless, as with the other British dominions, endeavor to cultivate the most friendly political relations, but we shall be very cautious about becoming entangled in what may, after all, prove to be only a temporary political gesture toward com-pleter economic independence of British markets and British entrepreneurs...

...to do business in Tunis, the Cafe de la Paix and the ubiquitous "Defense d'Af-ficher" are prerequisites...

...The Tsana Dam project was acquired only after the most vigorous political and economic competition and was probably granted largely because of the division of European policies in Abyssinia, where British, French and Italian lines of policy cross each other and neutralize each other from time to time in the vicissitudes of European politics...

...Portugal in East Africa and Angola ; Spain in Morocco, the Rio de Oro and Fernando Po-all are overshadowed by the solid organization of economic and colonial power wielded by the French republic and the united kingdom...

...The two powers are as one in defense of the status quo which they have created and from which they hope to draw future wealth and prosperity...

...Only South America possesses comparable wealth and in South America the Monroe Doctrine has never stood as an effective barrier against French or British trade, investments and industry...

...The major economic interest of the United States in Africa lies in the future...

...But the wealth of Africa is not equally available to the world...

...For that reason analyses and statistics of present trade are valueless...

...To have brought order to tribal barbarism, to have suppressed piracy, the slave trade, to have mitigated slavery and cannibalism, to have developed wealth and spread civilization, railroads, highways, mines, irrigation works and water power in the largest and wealthiest of the continents-this is the Franco-British achievement...

...Forced labor methods in French and other Latin colonies in Africa suggest that the experiment of racial equality is bound to modify itself...

...Italy in Cyrenaica, Eritrea and Somaliland...

...The greatest single African resource-water power-may in time yield opportunity for our utility interests...

...No notable restrictions in British Africa have prevented American planters from opening up the country...

...Egyptian nationalism has induced Great Britain to grant independence to the kingdom of the Nile...

...If, however, our capital, our engineering brains and our resources are put at the disposal of British and French colonial enterprise, we shall find that there is honor and profit enough for all in that vast kidney-shaped treasure-house of natural wealth that dangles from Europe between the warm waters of the south Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, and which has broken the hearts of statesmen from the days of Moses and Hannibal to those of Caprivi, Delcasse and Bethmann-Hollweg.ethmann-Hollweg...

...Belgium in the Congo...

...And for these purposes, acceptance of the status quo is the prerequisite...

...There is nothing in American history to compare to it...