they exist in compact groups, as in Chicago, they are already making their influence felt. Above all, the status of the negro in the North is still strongly affected by the prejudices of the South. It is awkward to treat as an equal a man whom you know to be a pariah in Dixie. Northerners are protected by the Southern taboo which they ungratefully denounce. To give negroes rights and deny them privileges in places where they are numerically strong will not work smoothly forever. If we want the negro to be "kept in his place," he must have no rights at all. And the South knows also that any degree of social equality, any mitigation of the race stigma, would lead to intermarriage. The thought is abhorrent, not only to Southern minds but to many Northern ones as well. Daniel G. Brinton was born in Pennsylvania, and he taught in the City of Brotherly Love; he had an excellent reputation as an anthropologist, he was presumably a Christian, and had read many times over the words: "(God) hath made of one blood all nations of men." Yet, a whole generation after Lincoln, he expressed himself in this fashion: "A white man entails indelible degradation on his descendants who takes in marriage a woman of a darker race. . . . That philanthropy is false, that religion is rotten, which would sanction a white woman enduring the embrace of a colored man.' If this be the verdict of science, then the South is right. If you are determined not to reach a certain point, you should avoid entering the easy descent that will inevitably lead you down to it. To avert your glances and stumble, to clutch at loose stones and blades of grass, to try to clamber up and roll further down, is as undignified as it is dangerous. We should not by any means rush down the slope: we should either not start at all or proceed cautiously, steadily, fearlessly, with our eyes open. We are not committed to the pseudodemocratic fallacy of universal equality. "Racial realities," in Europe or in America, we have no desire to deny or to ignore. As soon as eugenics and anthroposociology reach the status of true sciences "Races and Peoples," published by David McKay, Philadelphia, 1901, p. 287. and come to severely scientific conclusions, we shall be willing to follow them. If it were proved that statesmen and poets could be "bred for points" in the same way as Airedales, we should welcome the new method. Many people would be delighted to know how Lloyd Georges and Winston Churchills can be made to order, so as to do exactly the opposite. Nay, no "false philanthropy," no "rotten religion" would prevent us from accepting the idea that undesirable strains, and even whole races, should be eliminated as unfit. Italy has shown the way in getting rid of the degenerate breed of crétins which, thanks to mistaken charity, had for ages saddened the valley of Aosta. Segregation, sterilization, and euthanasia could weed out the inferior elements, in a painless fashion, within less than a century. If all the colored races, red, brown, black, and yellow, were mistakes on the part of the Creator, let them go the way of the pterodactyl and the dinosaur. We might follow this agreeable train of thought a little further. Not all the families of the white race are equally valuable, and fit for a eugenic world. We might blackball from our Universal Club the Semites, who have been making themselves unpopular in all climes for at least six thousand years. We have little use for the shallow and unreliable Mediterranean, however quick-witted he may seem; we can dispense with the Alpine, who is stolid and slavish, a mere drag on progress. But especially we should get rid of the Nordics, a breed of fighters and mischief-makers, who have created trouble ever since they burst into history. They wrecked civilization once in the fourth century, and came very near wrecking it again in the twentieth. Then mankind would at last have peace. If we wanted the show to continue, we might pick out a new Deucalion and a new Pyrrha to replenish the world. There is nothing that we are not ready to do for the sake of science; but it is infinitely more difficult for science to come to conclusions than Mr. Lothrop Stoddard and Mrs. Gertrude Atherton surmise. Before we take drastic action involving the fate of millions, we must be sure of our bearings. If men would mate and reproduce with the indifference and rapidity of Mendel's peas, the truth might be within our grasp. But they won't, and that makes the process of experimentation extremely slow and hazardous. If, even after such mating, the lives of men had the sweet simplicity that characterizes the existence of peas, many disturbing factors, such as economic opportunities, social prejudices, religion, would be eliminated. But such is not the case, and the lessons we learn from peas can only with the utmost caution be translated into terms of human nature. An antitobacco lecturer injected some nicotine into the blood of a rabbit, and the rabbit obediently shimmied and died. But as the lecturer triumphantly asked his audience: "Now, what does this prove?" he received the scientifically valid answer: "It proves that we are not rabbits." The proper investigation of human conditions requires strict impartiality on the part of the investigator: it should be obvious that no man who writes with the sombre fervor of Brinton or Vacher de Lapouge can be trusted in his conclusions, however formidable his array of facts may be. His opinions may be right, and his facts may be right; but there is no necessary connection between the two. The gap is filled with passionate intuition, with a fine frenzy which is the very essence of lyrical poetry, and has no place anywhere else. We need not say that we would trust even less the mulatto GodetLaterrasse, the prospective author of an epoch-making treatise on "The Regeneration of Mankind through the Black Race"; and the harmless Godet-Laterrasse is here used as a symbol for several negro sociologists in this country, who have the same fervid imagination and the same devouring fire of feeling as the most ardent Nordicists. The true anthropologist must be a scholar, a poet and a saint. He must combine cautious respect for facts and their objective lessons with an unusual degree of sympathetic insight: for the dull collector of material facts will miss altogether the most subtle, which are also the most important, and he will not be able to interpret even the facts that he has noted. We need a man who can at the same time count chromosomes and understand "the soul of black folks." Hard as the requirements may be, we believe they can be met and that our departments of biology and anthropology offer many scientists not unequal to the task. The chief difficulty lies in the conditions of the experiment. Suppose that a biologist, carrying on researches with plants, should systematically place certain hybrids under unsuitable conditions of soil, moisture, and light, and then register the fact that these varieties were inevitably stunted in their growth-the fallacy would at once be apparent. Not in vain did Bacon teach us, over three centuries ago, the rudiments of the experimental method. If we want to measure the action of a particular factor, other conditions must be equal, and if they cannot be made equal, the differences must be as accurately discounted as possible. In other terms, science cannot come to any safe conclusion on the race problem until the overwhelming disturbing element, race prejudice, has been neutralized or at least taken into account. Merely to compare the moral or intellectual qualities of negroes with those of white men, even of the same social class, is manifestly unfair: for the very elite of the negro race live under a blight from which the lowest of the whites are free. That blight is spiritual rather than material. We have no way of ascertaining how many splendid minds it has warped into rebellion, crookedness, self-indulgence or apathy. It is generally conceded that negro children are fairly bright, but are outstripped by white children after ten or twelve. If this be a fact, is it due to physical or to social causes? Does not the pall of dulness that falls on negro minds coincide with the inexorable realization of the racial curse? That is why it seems to us that a thorough study of the psychosis called race prejudice should precede the study of races in themselves. That prejudice is a tremendous fact. It cannot be dismissed with a wave of the hand. It may be justified; but its being nearly universal is no justification, for idolatry, human sacrifices, polygamy, slavery, prostitution, drunkenness, monarchy, and war, once were universal as well. It may be baseless; but that detracts nothing from its potency: men have killed and died for false gods. A legend is a power in history, even though the scholar should prove it is but a fabrication or a delusion. Indeed, truth seldom becomes operative until it has assumed the semblance of a legend. Not facts and not heroes, but myths, are the true leaders of mankind. The terrible thing about prejudice is that it becomes self-supporting. It degrades its victims almost to the point of creating its own justification, and it blunts the critical sense of those who hold it, so that they cannot escape from its thrall. When it is established, men have to respect it in self-defense. A man may be as liberal as you please; but he must guard his children against any misalliance which would entail misery upon them without doing much to settle the problem. It may be society's fault; but it is never safe to be right against society, and no man is called upon to be a martyr, unless his martyrdom can serve some definite end. So even those who despise a taboo in their heart may be compelled to conform to it outwardly. For the masses of mankind, a taboo is interpreted as a condemnation. People are mercilessly punished for marrying outside their caste, class or race; and whatever we are punished for must be a sin. Thus, what is at first imposed through sheer force acquires moral consecration; morality adds its weight to force, force strengthens morality, and so ad infinitum. It is obvious, therefore, that in this country and for a long time to come mixed marriages will be few, and will have to fight their way to happiness against very heavy odds. There must be noble exceptions: I have heard of such, but, living as I did in the South, I have never come across any of them. Such marriages are most likely to occur in the abyss, among those who, through abject poverty or through degradation, have nothing to hope and nothing to fear from the smile or frown of society. A wealthy negro could purchase a bride at any rate, from the underworld; but a wealthy negro, unless he be a splendid brute suddenly enriched by a stroke of luck, will be too shrewd and too decent to run such a risk. So far as interracial unions are concerned, we can only repeat Mr. Punch's time-honored advice to those about to marry: Don't. Yet the problem is not purely academic. First of all, conditions are different in other countries, and we should at least make an effort to understand the attitude of the Brazilians, the Portuguese, and even the French in this matter. To give as an explanation that the Latins have no race feeling and the Anglo-Saxons have, is sheer intellectual laziness. For one thing, the French are no more "Latins" than we are "Anglo-Saxons." They and we are mixed races, and all that these purely linguistic terms Latin and AngloSaxon denote is that our language contains a larger proportion of Germanic roots than theirs. Then it is not an explanation at all, but a restatement. It belongs to the same class as the good old reason why opium causes sleep: because of its dormitive property. Even in the conduct of our own affairs to-day, it is by no means indifferent whether we believe that intermarriage is fundamentally evil and should be prevented at any cost, or whether we are willing to let the experiment be tried. For, in the first place, as we have attempted to show, the Southern attitude alone is honest and consistent. We should not promise equality, if in the secrecy of our hearts we rule out the final test of equality. Either we shall have to shuffle forever amid unworthy equivocations, or ultimately political equality will destroy the racial taboo. The first alternative may prevail indefinitely: for, as Irving Babbitt, quoting one of his Harvard freshmen, wisely remarked, our religion, like that of China, is Confusionism. We have been cherishing for three hundred years both the Protestant right of private interpretation and the purely ecclesiastical notion of orthodoxy, without daring to face the obvious fact that the two are incompatible. Still, the power of an idea, both germinative and disruptive, will, in the very long run, assert itself, even in our non-logical Anglo-Saxon minds. The idea should be killed now or frankly acknowledged. That is why, although I did not believe that intermarriage on any important scale was either possible or desirable at this time and in this country, I was in terested in debating the question with my Southern friends. In most cases, the subject was simply dismissed as absurd. But there are thinking men in the South, and arguments were not lacking. The first and the most convenient is that intermarriage is against the law of God, who made the races different and intended that they should remain different. Race mixture is an attempt to tamper with the Work of the Seven Days. As the Afrikanders put it, God created the white man, and God created the black man; but the devil created the mulatto. The South is extremely pious, after a fashion: this is one of the many points upon which the white and the dark inhabitants of that section are at one and noticeably different from the godless Yankees. The argument has force with them: race mixture is to be condemned on religious grounds, as emphatically as Darwinism or the experiments of Luther Burbank. The trouble was that I could not find a conclusive text to set my doubts at rest. On the contrary, our common descent from Adam would make the whole race theory heretical. Even if we admitted that the negroes are issued from Adam's first wife, Lilith, still we are all of one blood, created after God's own image, and redeemed by the same Christ. riage is unnatural, a veritable perversity, abhorrent to healthy minds. That the South fiercely objects to the social aspect and the responsibilities of intermarriage is plain enough. But repugnance to sexual union is a different matter. There are millions of living proofs that, before the Civil War at any rate, such repugnance did not exist. I was struck, when I first came to this country, by the fact that the undiluted African type is rare among our negroes. There are few of them who have not some white blood in their veins, and many could claim descent from aristocratic British ancestors. The very stringency of the Southern laws is evidence that artificial restraint is needed: there is no law forbidding mating with totally different species. Indeed, you would believe, from the codes and the talks of the South, that all their young men were yearning to marry negresses and could be prevented from doing so only by the most formidable barriers. I, who was born under the same latitude as Newfoundland, and have never felt the slightest temptation in that direction, could not help feeling that the fears of the South were slightly exaggerated. The trump argument is that the hybrid is, on the whole, inferior to both the parent races. This is the opinion to which The discussion then shifts from Scrip- the Boer quoted above gives such vigortural to scientific grounds. The Bible ous theological expression. It would need practically ignored the dark races, but to be examined with scrupulous care. It they are an unchangeable reality all the is evident that the hybrids are placed same. Whereupon I took delight in quot- under abnormally difficult circumstances, ing the theories of G. Sergi, the Italian and that the conditions of their upbringanthropologist, to whom even the strictly ing can seldom be satisfactory. It is even orthodox Brinton did homage. Accord- more obvious that they are not so likely ing to Sergi, the dolichocephalic (long- as the pure negroes to "know their place, skulled) races are branches of the same which is the South's cherished ideal for species, which he calls Eurafrican. The all colored people. Hence the bitter hapure African, the Mediterranean, and the tred often directed against the "yellow Nordic are cousins. But how can their nigger." But, on this point, as on many difference in pigmentation be accounted others, the extreme racialists fail in confor? Like the differences between the sistency. If you mention the brilliant brown bear, the grizzly, and their polar achievements of certain colored men, the congener, the fairness of the Nordics is Southerners will say: "Oh! So-and-so "a kind of albinism produced by a climate had white blood in him"; and much as where thermal action is weak."* In they profess to love the coal-black darky, other words, the Nordic is a negro- they cannot fail to recognize, while debleached out. Which, as Stephen Lea- ploring, the ambition and cleverness of cock would say, is "behind the beyond." the mulatto.* There is a plaza in Paris The next argument is that intermar* Sergi, "The Mediterranean Race," Scribners, 1901. *According to The Literary Digest, Judge Albert Bailey George, elected in Chicago in 1924, is of half-white parentage on both sides. dedicated to the three Alexander Dumas. The first, the son of a Haytian planter and of a negress, was a general at the time of the Revolution and the Empire. The second, unmistakably African in coloring and features, was the jolly giant who has fascinated three generations with his romantic tales, who made and lost several fortunes, managed newspapers and theatres, hobnobbed with the greatest in the land, and preceded Henry Ford in devising methods of quantity production. The third, besides giving an everlasting and deplorable model of maudlin romanticism in "La Dame aux Camélias," besides suffering from a painful excess of technical skill and Parisian wit, created the modern problem play, paved the way for symbolism on the stage before Ibsen had been heard of, and wrote homiletic, paradoxical, glittering prefaces when Bernard Shaw, his ungrateful son, was still in his cradle. Few Nordic families could offer the same record of physical and intellectual energy as that "colorful" dynasty of the Dumas. Once more, I am only pleading for careful study: I am not claiming in advance that the mulatto is a desirable product. I am only stating that the fine record of many people of mixed parentage should prevent us from accepting blindly any adverse verdict. On the whole, analogies drawn from other branches of biology are favorable to cross-breeding, if it be followed by selection. The finest breeds of dogs, horses, and plants are the result of careful crossing. This proves very little, I know; but it may at any rate act as a check on a priori conclusions. A final argument, heard in the North as well as in the South, is that interbreeding would bring about a dead level of uniformity. This, it is contended, would involve a great loss, not merely in picturesqueness but also in efficiency. For racial differences are a condition of progress. This last assertion is extremely vague. It is in contradiction with the claim that "The Great Race" alone, by which is meant the Nordic, or at least the Caucasian, is responsible for modern civilization. But, if it could be stated in a more accurate and more complex manner, it would probably be found to contain a large element of truth. All races, white or dark, have their own special contributions to bring to the common treasure of mankind. But would intermarriage abolish races? Even in this country, if the policy of race mixture were as sedulously encouraged as it has been rigorously tabooed, the blending of the different elements would not be complete for many hundreds of years. If the process continued unchecked, the United States in the third millennium of our era, would be a purely white country, with imperceptible traces of negro blood. The population would be lighter, on the average, than the southern Europeans of the present day. Europe would remain purely white, eastern Asia yellow, southern Asia brown, tropical Africa black. The one large area in which the mixture might produce a real levelling, instead of the absorption of minorities, is Brazil, because in that country the three main races are almost equal in numbers. The possibility that all Hindus, all Chinamen, all Europeans and North Americans, all Africans, should migrate and intermarry so freely as to destroy the old race distinctions is too remote for human imagination. The New World, so far as we can foresee, would remain substantially as varied as the Old. As a matter of fact, it would be immeasurably more varied: hybridization creates complexity, not uniformity-a complexity to which there is literally no limit. This is well recognized by the students of Spanish-American civilization. In the countries south of us, by the side of the pure razas, there are innumerable castas: mestizo, mulatto, zambo, to start with; then others, for which the Mexicans have picturesque and not always flattering names: lobo, chino, cambujo, coyote, salio atrás, tente en el aire, no te entiendo, ahi te estás. As every new variety can mate with any of the pre-existing ones, the list could be extended so as to strain the resources even of the marvellously rich Spanish vocabulary. The danger of uniformity, therefore, is not even remote: it is purely fanciful. Not only will the big racial blocks remain solid, as far as we can foresee; but wherever blood mixture is likely to occur, the result will be an increase in the number of human types. It may then be the task |