France and Her Color Problem

I

WHEN the World War became unavoidable, the German Government proposed that the colonies should be left out of the struggle. As they put it, the conflict concerned only states whose populations were European in race and mentality; numerous drawbacks would result if colored peoples were brought into the field. In principle, such a proposal was reasonable enough, and in several neutral countries France was blamed for demurring. But, while the Berlin Government was making this humanitarian suggestion, its agents in the Cameroon had assumed the offensive on the right bank of the Congo River.

Whether thoughtless or deliberate, their action justified every suspicion of duplicity. The French Government already had many grounds of suspicion, and could not disregard so unanswerable a reason for declining to enter into the covenant. Furthermore such a covenant was now impracticable.

Even if the Germans had been acting in good faith, — and perhaps selfinterest made William II mean what he said in this case, — even if they had ordered their cruisers to make the bases at Tsingtao and in the Oceanian archipelagoes unavailable, guns and rifles would have gone off spontaneously in Africa. There were too many common frontiers, too many adjacent forts for commanders to remain inert, face to face, in statu quo ante bellum. So Britain brought her Indian warriors to Europe and France brought in her colored contingents, to full the place planned for them in the initial mobilization scheme.

The war went on far beyond the term prophesied for it in the beginning by all the experts. The British Empire had to call upon its Indian troops for reënforcements sufficient to help FieldMarshal French’s ‘contemptible little army’ to keep the front until volunteers from the United Kingdom and from the Dominions, and, later on, conscription, could bring the required strength into the line. From a few thousand men at the beginning, the number of fighting men — yellow, brown, and black — enlisted by France approached a million. Apportioned according to their natural abilities among battlefields, workshops, and corps at the rear, they neutralized the effects of the Russian Revolution until the arrival of the Americans. During the struggle, where numbers were of greater importance than formerly, colonial contingents, and especially the black troops, proved of considerable value in filling gaps. Of a surety they did not ‘win the war’; but they rendered the French army’s stand less difficult during the period that extended from the hecatomb at Verdun until the intervention of the United States.

Such a result went far beyond what had been hoped at first. When, before the war, General Mangin advocated that the ‘black power’ should be used, he was thinking mainly of overseas theatres of operation; but when they saw their colonial auxiliaries fighting side by side with home forces against a redoubtable enemy, the French people did not stint their praise. Public writers, whose function was to keep up ‘the morale at the rear,’ did not fail to harp on the grateful ‘Sons of the Desert rushing to the help of the mother country assaulted by barbarians’; and those who read events only through the distorting glasses of electioneering politics waxed so enthusiastic as to propose that all native fighting men from overseas should be made citizens and voters by a grateful nation.

Precious little do the black, yellow, or brown fellows care about this. A place may be allotted them in the home forces in peace-time, because France is compelled by the disturbed condition of Europe to keep up an army as powerful as the army of 1914; but unprompted they would never dream of considering themselves on a par with Frenchmen born in Gascony or Normandy. The slogan, ‘France is a nation with a hundred million inhabitants,’ which General Mangin hit upon to describe the country’s resources and power, may be broadly interpreted, with this understanding. It sums up, in fact, the discussion which has so long divided French colonial circles into supporters of ‘association’ and supporters of ‘assimilation.'

Despite the ascertained effects of the latter theory, not only in the United States of America, but also in the old French colonies, — the West Indies, Reunion, India, and Senegal, the supporters of assimilation will not admit that they have the worst of it. They would not be sorry to avail themselves of this problem concerning the colored soldiers, to renew an experiment which, up to the present, has always proved the reverse of successful.

II

Irrespective of the opinions of extremists, always on the decrease, who would submit the inhabitants of countries forced open to civilization by might of arms to a sort of slavery for the benefit of the conquerors, any colonial policy whatsoever can be designed only on the principle of fraternity, according to the Gospel, or on the principle of equality, according to J.-J. Rousseau. Recognized as a fundamental axiom for home consumption by nations with a European culture, the principle of equality has brought to them nothing but class-hatred, economic troubles, and revolutions, inscribed in charters granted to colonies peopled with natives whose culture and mentality are different, it becomes, under the label of ‘assimilation,’ a ferment of demagogy; that is to say, of the oppression of minorities by might of numbers.

On the contrary, the principle of fraternity allows the continuance of social classes, resulting from individual abilities, qualities, and defects. It simplifies the problems of home politics by freely accepting the idea of reciprocal rights and duties. Applied to colonial management, it defines the task of the colonizing nation, which then readily considers the welfare of the conquered people as favorable to its own interest, and a part of its own problem.

To assimilate a nation means to transform it to the likeness of the assimilator. Until the two nations have achieved moral unity, genuine assimilation is not possible. In fact, a common patrimony of general ideas is necessary, in order that the codes, legislation, institutions, which seem suitable for the assimilator, may work harmoniously with the assimilated. Both will then, as it were mentally, speak the same language.

Although he had never traveled outside of France, our great minister Colbert drew up, by sheer power of reasoning, a colonization policy for Canada. ‘Call the natives to a community of life with the French, but only after instructing them in the maxims of our religion, and even in our manners, so that they may ultimately make, with those of ours who migrate to Canada, one and the same nation.’ Such were his instructions to governors of New France, inviting them to consider religious missionaries as their best helpers. This condition of mind obtained in all leaders throughout the kingdom, and was indeed common to all great colonizers descended from the Latin race. In a new settlement, the church and the fort were built at the same time.

Verily, religious unity is a powerful aid in making Christian civilization accessible to savage people since, in nations of European origin, religion and civilization have, in the course of centuries, become synonymous. But religious unity is effective only if it is sustained, so that time may fix the stamp of religion upon the mentality of the subject race. Home politics may, on the other hand, prevent or hinder the success of the work undertaken by the agents of religious propaganda. In any case, results are long in coming; for every passing generation transmits to the next one only a small part of its ideal.

Furthermore, this method of assimilation must be administered delicately. Except with primitive peoples, where the ‘nation’ concept does not exist, ‘the foreigner’s religion’ is likely to be so stressed and fostered by the lay authorities as to repel the subjects whose loyalty these authorities desire to secure. To be served by missionaries and not to serve them, as a former Governor-General of Indo-China, Paul Bert, put it, would just amount to turning missionaries into the conqueror’s political agents; they would be irretrievably discredited, and would gather round them only a mob of hypocrites, always ready to turn traitors or rebels.

The slogan of assimilation through religion is, therefore, applicable only if the time factor is fully allowed for; if religious propaganda is safe from distrustful and vexatious interference by lay authorities; and if the latter do not fret to transfer too precipitately into political institutions the social results of proselytizing. But nowadays such conditions are hardly obtainable. Christendom is too much rent by schisms, heresies, rationalism, and so forth; and these divisions, which influence home politics, chiefly in France, make it impossible to achieve moral unity in the colonies through religious commonalty.

III

Let us, then, consider the colonizing countries, especially those which, while maintaining an established church, admit liberty of conscience. Will they object to the propagation of dissident confessions among the inhabitants of their overseas possessions? Of course not, since it would be a contradiction in terms to prevent representatives of a different faith from preaching and making converts, within the limits of moral and public order. The desirable unity preparatory to assimilation is, therefore, unattainable.

Sometimes, too, the requirements of foreign policy further complicate the problem. France, for instance, like the British Empire, has become, to use the adopted phrase, a ‘Moslem power.’ Whom, then, would her leaders favor, if they introduced the religious factor into the unavoidable struggle against the fetishism and barbarian practices of her African Negroes — the missionary or the Marabout? Obviously, reason and sentiment plead in favor of the first; but there are numerous ‘anticlericals’ who think themselves clever in preferring the other.

Be that as it may, Frenchmen have given up all attempts to base the assimilation of their colored peoples on a community of religious faith. I am well aware that, according to a certain school, race and religion are inseparable, for every race has the religion that suits its own particular mentality; and that therefore Negroes cannot adopt the white man’s creeds and conform to them closely enough to become morally and politically assimilable to white men. No doubt such creeds become rather distorted when dogmatic discipline is relaxed, or when groups of converts rid themselves too completely of their white pastors’ guidance; the return of the Negroes of the West Indies and Louisiana to the Voodoo cult is proof of this. But no general rule can be drawn from such examples; for it is found that, in so-called ‘missionary’ countries, natives whose ancestors have been Christian for several generations have, as regards moral law, the mentality of white men. And they might be entitled to inquire, in their turn, how many white men have gone back, through regression, to savage mentality.

Assimilators, unwilling or unable to use religion for their political purposes, have resorted to the government school as a substitute. They seem to have expected official education, besides metamorphosing exotic mentalities, to put an end to the very traditions of race or of nationality, by inducing a voluntary, or compulsory, adoption of the conquerors’ language by the conquered peoples. But an imposed language will speak only if habitually practised. It will become transformed, sooner or later, through the natural genius of the people which received it, and will become a dialect, like the Creole, as unintelligible to home folk as a foreign language.

As to the school, considered as an exclusive factor of assimilation, no one any longer questions its utter failure. Colored boys, taught according to the pedagogical methods obtaining in Europe, have not acquired a European mentality by cramming the rudiments of exact sciences, history, geography, and independent morals; a minority retains just enough of that intellectual baggage to scheme for berths in the administrative hierarchy. Genuinely ‘uprooted,’ they have only contempt for the field or the workshop from which they originate. Some of them —and their members are on the increase — take ship, at their own or the Budget’s expense, and sail overseas, to pick up something of the white man’s higher education. From their varied contacts with European civilization, they bring back titbits of knowledge and cargoes of pretensions. They claim, and proclaim, that adequate justice is never rendered to their merits, and that they are learned enough to emancipate their brethren from alien guardianship.

All colonizing peoples have been deceived by this mirage of education. All have built government schools, in which they have made a point of ignoring the pedagogy of volunteer educators, such as missionaries, whose experience was by no means contemptible. Placid Dutchmen, utilitarian Britishers, have not been clearer-sighted than overbearing Spaniards and French ideology-mongers. None guessed that, by broadcasting promiscuously a learning and ideas elaborated in the course of centuries in European societies, they were gorging weakling stomachs with food too rich; for ‘no man putteth new wine into old bottles,’ or ‘a piece of new cloth unto an old garment.’ And this is why Japanese agitators, Indian baboos, Tunisian, Algerian, Egyptian, or Annamite young bloods are hostile to their teachers. They dream of supplanting them in the command of the masses, whose racial antagonisms these natives arouse and excite, the better to exploit and fleece them. Haiti, Liberia, and their like offer examples of what can be expected.

The army, too, has been considered as an agent of assimilation fully as efficient as the school by some military men daft on sociology. But the haunting remembrance of Rome calling barbarians to her legions has inspired attempts only in these countries where Romans and barbarians have been longest in agreement, that is to say, in the last theatres of the Punic Wars, where vestiges of Roman grandeur are impressive to this day. Frenchmen were the only ones to think that common life without any distinction as to races, in Algerian and Tunisian barracks and camps, would create indelible sympathies, and erase the differences of mentality between natives and settlers, so that there would be in Northern Africa a homogeneous people under common laws.

It must be acknowledged that the military failed as woefully as the pedagogues, yet with far less serious consequences. The failure hurts only sentiment, offended by the close promiscuity permitted between dissimilar races, and has no political after-effects. Native malcontents and reformers never come from barracks: they swarm from schools and universities.

Life in common, similar physical characteristics, the equity of the military status or charter, may attenuate the fundamental rancor of a conquered race; they are not adequate to bring about its assimilation. They would have to be supported by analogous morals and ideals. Now, Islamism has erected between Frenchmen and Arabo-Berber populations a barrier which certain governing authorities, who thought themselves profound statesmen, have even strengthened. In order to obviate conflicts of creeds, men prevented Christianity, first from penetrating among the more accessible Berbers, and afterward from spreading among the Arabs. Thus no durable alliance could be established by marriages between natives and immigrants whom the former never ceased to consider as loathsome infidels. And yet, in the light of the results obtained with Canadian Boisbrûlés, one can imagine what would happen in Northern Africa from the mixing of races far less different from one another than Indians and Palefaces. Europeanized Berbers, Arab and Latin crossbreeds, if they were many, would protect French Northern Africa against the always possible outbursts of Moslem fanaticism.

IV

Supporters of association are less chimerical. They have realized that assimllators, always, like all ideologists, in far too great a hurry, would sow the wind to reap the whirlwind. The ‘Indian Unrest,’ so ably described by Sir Valentine Chirol, was in fact taken, by most colonials with an observing turn of mind, as a serious warning. Even previous to the World War, associationists were elaborating plans uninspired by orthodox doctrine, but in which the teachings of experience were taken into account rather than the dreams of theorists. Not being in office, they were unheeded. The tranquillity of the colonies during the struggle, despite the economical and general effort that war demanded of them; the fine behavior of the troops; the zeal of the laborers sent by the colonics to Europe; the conquest of a great part of the Cameroon, were even turned by assimilators into arguments against association.

In France, however, people were thinking at last of the logical consequences flowing from the Wilsonian principle of nationalities. Spread among other folk after victory, it would be, sooner or later, put to the war-winners themselves, who by calling upon colored people for help could not but suggest to the latter comparisons with those ethnic minorities whose political bonds the Entente had cut, in the name of Right. No doubt, in accomplishing the work of justice, the Entente did show here and there that Might continued to be Right, but this selfsame Entente laid herself open to the misadventure of Seeing her own exotic subjects claim against her the Right of Oppressed Nationalities. President Wilson did not, to be sure, foresee so remote and far-reaching an effect of his manifesto; a few colored agitators, who had acquired in the intellectual circles of old Europe, of America, and of Japan, a thin scientific veneer and formidable ambitions, realized that the moment was propitious to cut a figure, at any rate academically, as liberators or deliverers. Against their mouthings of theories founded on sentiment nothing can be expected; but appeals to interest are likely to be better listened to by such nations as will hear them.

It is, therefore, association for the development of the common demesne that should be resorted to for ensuring the political loyally of ‘inferior brethren,’ whose inferiority, if indeed it exists, would be at any rate but a conventional phenomenon, and in any case quite a transitory one. An eminent professor in our Colonial School, Louis Vignon, teaches the necessary policy to future administrators and magistrates as follows: —

Such a policy is the art of leading populations, through their natural chieftains as intermediaries, without perturbing their creeds, methods of life, and habits; of limiting interference to an invitation to reform their customs in so far as these are too inconsistent with our moral and judicial ideas; the art of making them accept contact with settlers, or at least of helping them to suffer as little as possible from the intercourse; it is again the art of leading them without haste, at their own gait, toward a better social, political, and economic condition — a condition, however, always in accord with their mentality, and suited to their developing intellectual capacities.¹

And farther on: —

In a family, the father — and if France is not the father, she is the guardian — the father gives orders, and for their own good, to his youngsters. He says: ’You must.’ Later on, as they grow up, the father still gives orders, but vouchsafes reasons and explanations; later on again, when his boys have become men, he listens to their motives, discusses, tempers, resolves, gives way ultimately . . . unless, on the strength of his experience, age, and responsibilities, he does oppose his veto.

Unless, also, experience derives from routine or greed. For then the veto results in disagreements, lawsuits, and recovered independence; but this is another story.

Such a theory of government sets aside the utopias of its assimilators as they deserve to be set aside. It is wise enough to preserve France’s colonial demesne for a long time from inner storms; and it indicates means through which our subjects and protégés may be inspired with faith in the excellence of our régime, so that they may not seek in themselves, or elsewhere, greater wealth and tranquillity than is found with us. But such wealth is not as yet open to all; vast tracts are even doomed to poverty and hardship because of poor natural possibilities, or the miserable condition of the inhabitants. Despite their wisdom, the theories taught to future colonial leaders would run great risks of proving, as do so many others, little more than idle speculations, did they not beget some really practical conclusion.

Well, then, it has long been an ascertained fact that material progress follows but belatedly in the wake of intellectual and political reforms; there has been a lack of balance between the desires with which the natives should be inspired and the means of satisfying them. War itself revealed the inadequacy of the material transformations undertaken here and there in various parts of our overseas dominions. The recruiting of soldiers and of laborers, the development and transport of natural produce, so necessary for the mother country, were hindered, and sometimes rendered impossible, by distances, precarious means of communication, local ignorance or unconcern.

On a par, therefore, with shielding France from the surprises of an uncertain future, and with spreading among subordinate peoples a sentiment of loyalty, is the notion of interesting them in the development of a material prosperity, of whose benefits they themselves would partake. In the new order of things, they would not be considered as slaves, or as herds of voters, but as associates, as partners, whose gallantry and loyalty would help to defend the joint property, whose toil would contribute to increase the firm’s assets, and who would reap returns in proportion to profits.

Such is the initial, the basic, principle of the Sarraut plan. The present Colonial Minister has laid before Parliament a vast scheme of Public Works, which would transform French possessions into centres of keen activity. Labor’s wages would circulate among the natives as a great part of the capital invested; outside the yards, natives would readily ‘make good,’ because of the open markets which would foster the development of their own country’s hidden riches. Medical assistance, sanitation, sanitary stations extended to remotest districts, would suppress the excessive ravages of mortality in which ignorance, superstitions, and routine are more instrumental than country and climate.

In professional schools and universities, established especially for its requirements, intelligent and industrious youth would study such sciences as are immediately practical for farmers, traders, contractors, and manufacturers. Through ports, railroads, telegraphs, canals, waterworks, a benumbed world would be awakened; situations less disappointing than the so-called liberal professions would be open to the future intellectual élite of our colored populations. By business practice, by systematic and sustained work, they would conquer what is far more satisfactory and substantial than a shabby and jaundiced mandarinate — the white man’s respect. They would sit side by side with white men, not above or below them, in the mixed professional assemblies which governments consult and listen to because such bodies are more representative of the natives’ and settlers’ joint interests than are political parties. As to the masses, whence gifted individuals could rise into the upper classes, they would easily adapt themselves to their new circumstances; daily bread ensured, increased welfare, watchful justice, facilitated transactions, instruction sensibly given, would make them wary of spellbinders, and of the blandishments and trickery of politicians.

Grounded on the principle taught by Louis Vignon at the Colonial School; protected by the armor forged by General Mangin; carried out according to Albert Sarraut’s plan, the utilitarian policy designated by the term ‘association’ is obviously the one best suited for a colonizing nation anxious, as a sovereign power, to preserve the golden mean of government. At any rate, it is a convenient system of expediency, provided that, under pretense of neutrality or of respect for habits and customs, no forces inimical to the white man’s educational guardianship are permitted to ferment and grow.

V

Will not the living together of exotic people and Frenchmen in the home country generate the most powerful of such inimical forces, which, ceaselessly increasing, as natives are discharged and return to their own communities, will eventually overthrow a laboriously built social edifice? And in the metropolis itself, will not this same force have its effect on the mentality of the race, and on the government’s general policy? Certain friends of France seem to have feared, and some Frenchmen too have apprehended, that this might be the issue. Such misgivings might be justified, if the exceptional safeguards imposed on the nation by necessity, during and after the war, were to be extended and long continued.

Despite treaties and ententes, our safety is more threatened than ever. The perturbed post-war condition of the world, a prophetic description of which was given in the ‘Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,’ contains the nucleus of even more violent catastrophes. The return of Alsace-Lorraine to the French does not make our population more numerous than it was in 1914. Military service has been reduced from three years to eighteen months as a result of victory. We have, therefore, to recruit from overseas about one sixth of the army’s peace establishment. A hundred thousand Arabo-Berbers, Negroes, Malagasy, and Annamites are thus going to live our daily life, watch perhaps our domestic disputes, take pride in having become our defenders. They will be ceaselessly renewed, and will broadcast to the remotest limits of our frontiers in Africa and Asia the ideas suggested to them by contact with the European world. Well, is it not on the cards that what they will have seen will be so utterly different from what they were accustomed to see as to upset somewhat their judgment?

Frenchmen who have not lived among colored people eagerly express for them the benevolent curiosity and naive admiration which Montesquieu so aptly described in his Persian Letters. Such feelings, which astonish and even disgust colonials, Creoles, and foreigners, who deem them inconsistent with traditional race hierarchy, influence in different degrees the AraboBerbers, Annamites, and Malagasy. The first-named, coming from a country where Europeans are numerous and where the interests frequently are inimical, accept with the condescension of the Believer for the Infidel those attentions and convivialities. The Annamites, despite their stout natural vanity, which is founded on historical records, a social fabric, a civilization quite independent of their present political condition, are more easily dazzled by the gratuitous and fulsome tokens of solicitude bestowed on them, but compare them, not without bitterness, with the social barriers that separate the two races in their own country. As to the Negroes, they bring to France the mentality of savages but little accustomed to reason. For the present, it does not occur to them to demand the treatment accorded to their brethren hailing from the West Indies, Reunion, or the Four Communes, who are entirely assimilated, that is to say, considered by law as fullblown citizens.

The latter, those same full-blown citizens, combine an almost sickly touchiness with a boundless vanity. They are proud to send a few members to Parliament; they think it quite natural to be on exactly the same footing as white soldiers in the home forces; and to General Pershing’s black regiments their condition appeared quite enviable.

Utterly different are the Africans recruited for Senegalese rifles battalions and colonial artillery batteries. The blemishes and vices of civilized folk are not yet grafted on their own deficiencies and vices; they have no heavy heredity of slavery, and demagogy has not yet visited them. Lastly, and chiefly, they are not left to themselves, uncontrolled, under officers of their own race. They are led by colonial army officers and noncommissioned officers, who know them and handle them in a way suited to their mentality. Besides, while Frenchmen and AraboBerbers are, according to the assimilation theory, very much mixed in home forces recruited from Northern Africa, the white race still keeps, in accordance with the association theory, its prerogatives as to command in all native regiments (Annamites, Malagasy, Blacks) appertaining to the colonial army in France and in French Colonies.

But whatever may be the ideas implanted in all those auxiliaries by their sojourn in France, it can be questioned whether these ideas are calculated to act rapidly as a leaven in the minds of colonized populations. The hundred thousand men supplied by those populations to the French army come from very diverse countries. They are not all quartered together on French soil: at least two thirds of them are employed in Northern Africa, Syria, Morocco. When they go home, they disperse almost singly among sixty million people, and immense spaces part them. Well-nigh all of them fall again at once under the influence of race and environment. They are not attracted in crowds to the factories, for industry is still nascent in those countries; and they thus escape the dangerous activities of professional agitators, or impressionable masses of workers. Before long, they will recollect their European life only as a dream or — perhaps — as a nightmare.

They cannot, therefore, be compared now to emigrants settling in an adopted country. They remain outside social life; the intercourse they have with the inhabitants is not sufficient to modify even slightly the physical and moral type of the race. Compared with the racial increase among other really European peoples, the ethnic current which they constitute would be too small to escape rapid and complete absorption.

VI

Reciprocal reactions will be practically negligible, if not renewed for a great number of years. But persistence of that armed peace under the burden of which Europe staggers in unstable equilibrium must have a less stupefying effect. Within France, the influx of colored peoples will remain limited to a few garrison towns and a few manufacturing centres. It will perhaps manifest itself among local populations by a few modifications, analogous to the strain which, in the Mediterranean Languedoc, testifies to the long stay of Moslem Semites. Such reactions would be nothing like the crossbreedings in the West Indies and Southern States, where the blacks, imported willy-nilly, and being more numerous than the white immigrants, constitute a particularist block, with political pretensions. But if, owing to circumstances, discharged auxiliaries gather in considerable groups in their countries of origin, they will carry back a queer mixture of longings and notions, with which fosterers of colonial development will have to reckon.

It is a fact proved by experience that exotic races, thrown into temporary contact with European civilization, perceive only their less admirable aspects, and retain chiefly the paradoxical rigmaroles which bamboozle the ‘unconscious’ masses. Should circumstances favor the gathering of crowds at some place where the economic metamorphosis of a region is being prepared for, discharged rankers and laborers back from Europe will be attracted thither by the advantages offered or promised. In mills and the yards of public works, they will constitute an elite of salaried nondescripts — exacting, caviling, impulsive; more engrossed with their rights than impressed with their duties; and thoroughly up to the latest methods of proletariat defense. White or colored employers, even if disposed to conduct their business and to treat their employees according to Europe’s Christian spirit, will have to guard against a mob-psychology very much like that which paralyzes Europe’s renascence or recovery. It is to facilitate France’s recovery that Cabinet Minister Albert Sarraut wants to endow the Colonies, by means of his Development Works Plan, with the equipment they lack. Such works will bring together crowds of workmen and employees whose racial antagonisms will very soon embitter the labor disputes to be expected. And a mere glance at our British friends’ affairs suffices to show to what lengths a Gandhi can, on racial grounds, beguile labor.

It is by no means light-heartedly, therefore, that France incurs such difficulties. Nor is it deliberately to humiliate her eventual enemies that she admits colored troops to her home forces. Let the influence of the ‘mysterious conductor.’ spoken of by Liebknecht, cease to be all-powerful in the origin, development, and sequels of the conflicts which constantly disturb old Europe, and the French will no more have to call to the rescue, on ancestral soil, their exotic auxiliaries. So long as she is exposed to German rancor or to Bolshevist scheming, so long will France have to rely on her soldiers’ gallantry for her very existence. Whether most of them be Annamites, Malagasy, or Senegalese, matters but little: after all, it is again and always for the common salvation of Christendom that she will use them.

(A companion article, dealing with the color problem which the British Empire faces in Africa, will appear in the April issue.)