Smith prints for the first time a letter of 29 January 1904 from Robert Stein, a Silesian-born translator at the US Geological Survey and an unsuccessful Arctic explorer, to the novelist Thomas Nelson Page. Stein wanted Britain to rename its Nigerian holdings Hopeland, install a Tuskegee graduate as a crowned emperor with all real authority reserved to an English resident, allow polygamy as an inducement, and take in nine million black Americans, whose counties at home would be closed to them one by one until they left. Smith sets the scheme in a century of colonisation proposals running from the American Colonization Society through Reconstruction-era Southern clergymen, and explains why every one of them collapsed: the money was never there, and black Americans refused to go. He reads the letter as a measure of how far Progressive-era racial thought could travel, and notes that Page, no liberal himself, quietly let it die.