I think Great Britain and her Allies have all of them to prepare their minds for a certain release of their grip upon their “possessions,” if they wish to build up a larger unity; I do not see that any secure unanimity of purpose is possible without such releases and readjustments.

Now the next class of foreign “possession” is that in which the French and Belgians and Italians are most interested.  Britain also has possessions of this type in Central Africa and the less civilised districts of India, but Russia has scarcely anything of the sort.  In this second class of possession the population is numerous, barbaric, and incapable of any large or enduring political structure, and over its destinies rule a small minority of European administrators.

The greatest of this series of possessions are those in black Africa.  The French imagination has taken a very strong hold of the idea of a great French-speaking West and Central Africa, with which the ordinary British citizen will only too gladly see the conquered German colonies incorporated.  The Italians have a parallel field of development in the hinterland of Tripoli.  Side by side, France, Belgium and Italy, no longer troubled by hostile intrigues, may very well set themselves in the future to the task of building up a congenial Latin civilisation out of the tribal confusions of these vast regions.  They will, I am convinced, do far better than the English in this domain.  The English-speaking peoples have been perhaps the most successful settlers in the world; the United States and the Dominions are there to prove it; only the Russians in Siberia can compare with them; but as administrators the British are a race coldly aloof.  They have nothing to give a black people, and no disposition to give.

The Latin-speaking peoples, the Mediterranean nations, on the other hand, have proved to be the most successful assimilators of other races that mankind has ever known.  Alexandre Dumas is not the least of the glories of France.  In a hundred years’ time black Africa, west of Tripoli, from Oran to Rhodesia, will, I believe, talk French.  And what does not speak French will speak the closely related Italian.  I do not see why this Latin black culture should not extend across equatorial Africa to meet the Indian influence at the coast, and reach out to join hands with Madagascar.  I do not see why the British flag should be any impediment to the Latinisation of tropical Africa or to the natural extension of the French and Italian languages through Egypt.  I guess, however, that it will be an Islamic and not a Christian cult that will be talking Italian and French.  For the French-speaking civilisation will make roads not only for French, Belgians, and Italians, but for the Arabs whose religion and culture already lie like a net over black Africa.  No other peoples and no other religion can so conveniently give the negro what is needed to bring him into the comity of civilised peoples....