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Name: Class: Date:

Chapter 1 - Introduction: The Study of Politics

ANSWER: True

9. Concerns about justice have only recently become important to political theorists.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False

10. Behaviorism is an offshoot of positivism that focuses mainly on the study of political behavior.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True

11. In order to explain why the Constitution of 1787 did not abolish slavery, scholars often skip over the question as to
whether or why slavery is wrong.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True

12. Behavioral political scientists place little emphasis on abstract or normative political questions.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True

13. Although political science has a variety of subfields, all of them use the same methodology.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False

14. Prestige, power, and wealth have political and moral consequences.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True

15. The scope of international relations goes beyond issues of war and peace between states.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True

16. The principle reason to study politics is

a. national interest.
b. self-interest.
c. public interest.
d. both A and B.
e. both B and C.

Copyright Cengage Learning. Powered by Cognero. Page 2

Name: Class: Date:

Chapter 1 - Introduction: The Study of Politics

ANSWER: e

17. What term is used to describe the ability to get others to want what you want?
a. Political power
b. Authority
c. Hard power
d. Soft power
e. Legitimacy
ANSWER: d

18. A country’s military capacity is an example of

a. soft power.
b. inherent legitimacy.
c. hard power.
d. misguided power.
e. legitimate authority.
ANSWER: c

19. Which of the following is an example of order in a society’s political system?

a. Justice
b. Rules
c. Economic Growth
d. Rituals
e. Both B and D
ANSWER: e

20. The political theory of the social contract is often associated with which of the following philosophers?
a. John Locke
b. Thomas Hobbes
c. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
d. Both A and B
e. All of the above
ANSWER: e

21. An independent political-administrative unit that successfully claims the allegiance of a given population is a
a. government.
b. state.
c. republic.
d. monarchy.
e. tyranny.
ANSWER: b

22. Arbitrary national borders that challenge the traditional idea of the nation-state emerged after
Copyright Cengage Learning. Powered by Cognero. Page 3
Name: Class: Date:

Chapter 1 - Introduction: The Study of Politics

a. decolonization.
b. the Peace of Westphalia.
c. the end of WWI.
d. the American Revolution.
e. None of the above is correct.
ANSWER: a

23. Which of the following best describes a people who are scattered over the territory of several states or dispersed
widely and who have no autonomous, independent, or sovereign governing body of their own?
a. Multinational state
b. Stateless nation
c. Nation state
d. Sovereign nation
e. None of the above
ANSWER: b

24. How do political theorists try to answer questions?

a. By using rational choice theory
b. By studying political culture
c. By applying reason, logic, and experience
d. Both A and C
e. None of the above
ANSWER: c

25. According to the text, which of the following is the “father” of political science?
a. Aristotle
b. Plato
c. Rousseau
d. Locke
e. Socrates
ANSWER: a

26. Normativism is normally associated with which political philosopher?

a. Immanuel Kant
b. Thomas Hobbes
c. Adolf Eichmann
d. Aristotle
e. Jean-Jacque Rousseau
ANSWER: a

27. Political scientists employing the behavioral approach tend to

a. concentrate on broad questions.
b. avoid moral and philosophical analysis.

Copyright Cengage Learning. Powered by Cognero. Page 4

Name: Class: Date:

Chapter 1 - Introduction: The Study of Politics

c. reject the application of the scientific method to political science.
d. draw heavily on the work of ancient political theorists.
e. use dependency theory.
ANSWER: b

28. “The moral values, beliefs, and myths by which people live and for which they are willing to die” is known as
a. political culture.
b. political realism.
c. rational choice.
d. behaviorism.
e. None of the above is correct.
ANSWER: a

29. What theory holds that individuals and states alike act according to the iron logic of self-interest?
a. Normative theory
b. Behavioral theory
c. Rational choice theory
d. Political realism theory
e. Political culture
ANSWER: d

30. What term is best used to describe the role of reason over emotion in human behavior?
a. Political realism
b. Public administration
c. Political theory
d. Single cause dogma
e. Rational choice
ANSWER: e

31. Studying the voting patterns of males in Senate elections would fall under which subfield?
a. Political theory
b. International relations
c. Comparative politics
d. U.S. government
e. Public administration
ANSWER: d

32. Political scientists who study similarities and differences in legislative processes across countries would be
working in which subfield?
a. Political theory
b. U.S. government
c. Comparative politics
d. International relations

Copyright Cengage Learning. Powered by Cognero. Page 5

Name: Class: Date:

Chapter 1 - Introduction: The Study of Politics

e. Public administration
ANSWER: c

33. A specialist in international relations would likely NOT focus on

a. conflict and cooperation.
b. terrorism.
c. trade policy.
d. the definition of the “good life.”
e. both C and D.
ANSWER: d

34. Which subfield would involve a political scientist who would specialize in how a bureaucracy implements
governmental policies?
a. Political theory
b. U.S. government
c. Comparative politics
d. International relations
e. Public administration
ANSWER: e

35. According to a recent issue of The Economist, what is the strongest force shaping politics today?
a. Ideas
b. Behavior
c. Money
d. Force
e. Terrorism
ANSWER: a

36. What kind of effect did the Peace of Westphalia have on the study of politics?
ANSWER: Student answers will vary.

37. Contrast the normative and behavioralist approaches to the study of political science. How do they differ? In what
ways might they complement one another?
ANSWER: Student answers will vary.

38. How important are ideas like justice and identity to the study of politics?
ANSWER: Student answers will vary.

39. Discuss Irving Kristol’s explanation of why some Germans participated in Nazi crimes against humanity. Use Adolf
Eichmann as an example. Can this theory be applied to any current-day moral actions/dilemmas? Explain.
ANSWER: Student answers will vary.

40. Imagine a country composed of two ethnic groups, one of which constitutes the majority of the population and the
other a significant minority. Each ethnic group considers itself to be a “nation.” How might the government go about
creating a sense of political unity and common purpose in its citizenry? In an attempt to foster a common identity, might

Copyright Cengage Learning. Powered by Cognero. Page 6

Name: Class: Date:

Chapter 1 - Introduction: The Study of Politics

some government strategies actually increase the gulf between the two nations? How?
ANSWER: Student answers will vary.

41. How might the six subfields of political science help us explore the issues and questions raised by the September 11
terrorist attacks on the United States? What questions would each subfield be most useful in addressing?
ANSWER: Student answers will vary.

Copyright Cengage Learning. Powered by Cognero. Page 7

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 II
THE PROBLEM FACED

The Southern States of North America at present offer to the

world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two
races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live
together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic
basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and
black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been,
and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white
man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either
entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from
savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of
political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any
predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish
America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it
is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure
European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these
regions can by any strain of language be called “white men’s
countries.”[47] In the British West Indies the whites are so small a
percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy;
and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the
slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover,
the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic,
has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white
community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly
inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his
essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations
with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death.
Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the
fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.
But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds
himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race
which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its
impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from
his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the
European, and not always very vividly realized even by the Northern
American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by
personal observation and through the medium of books. The details
of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this
Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential
facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state
the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to
me.

Numbers and Vitality of the Negro

In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers,
distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to
ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was
taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very
scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be
untrustworthy.
It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the
population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As
against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western
States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured
population of the United States is generally set down at about ten
million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one
million in the North and West.[48]
Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they
were multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied
that by 1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from
Maryland to Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself,
and appears to have been based on defective enumeration in the
census of 1870, which made the rate of negro increase between
1870 and 1880 seem quite inordinate. Now speculation has gone to
the other extreme, and prophesies the not very distant extinction of
the negro. This view is set forth with uncompromising emphasis by
Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):

The only cloud of any portentousness hanging over the prospects

of the Southern States is the continued expansion of the black
population.... The fact, however, that the white inhabitants, as a
body, are steadily outstripping the black in numbers, is an indication
that the evils which are now created by the presence of so many
negroes in the South will not relatively and proportionately grow
more dangerous.... When the development of the Southern States
along its present lines has reached its last stage, there is reason to
think that an even greater relative decline in the numerical strength
of the black population will set in. We have already pointed out the
probable effect of the subdivision of Southern lands, and the growth
of Southern towns, on the numerical expansion of the negro race. As
injurious to that race in the end as being shut out of the general
field of agriculture, or being subjected to an abnormally high rate of
mortality, will be the relentless competition which is one of the
conditions of modern life in all civilized communities. The vaster the
growth of the Southern States in wealth and white population, the
sharper and more urgent will be the struggle of the black man for
existence. In order to hold even his present position as a common
labourer he will have to exert himself to the utmost, and in doing so
to submit to a manner of life that will be even more unwholesome
and squalid than the one he now follows, and sure to lead to a great
increase in the already very high rate of mortality for his race. The
day will come in the South, just as it came long ago in the North,
when for lack of skill, lack of sobriety, and lack of persistency, the
negro will find it more difficult to stand up as a rival to the white
working-man. Already it is the ultimate fate of the negro that is in
the balance, not the ultimate fate of the Southern States in
consequence of the presence of the negro. The darkest day for the
Southern whites has passed.... The darkest day for the Southern
blacks has only just begun.

When I find this forecast cited with approval by Dr. E. A. Alderman

of the University of Virginia, it acquires some authority in my eyes;
but still it seems far from convincing. It leaves out of account one
probability and one certainty. The probability is that what may be
called the Hampton-Tuskegee movement—industrial education and
moral discipline—will in time so leaven the mass of the negro race as
to make it fitter to compete with white labour, and abler to resist the
destructive influences on which Mr. Bruce dwells with such gusto. I
call this a probability, not a certainty, for it is hard to tell as yet
whether the Hampton-Tuskegee spirit is really leavening the mass, or
only playing upon the surface. The industrial college at Hampton is
barely forty years old; Mr. Booker Washington’s great institute at
Tuskegee came into being less than thirty years ago; and the minor
offshoots of the movement are, of course, still younger. They have
not had time to give any just measure of their influence in promoting
the self-respect and the efficiency of the negro race. But there is no
doubt whatever that they are doing a remarkable and (from the
negro point of view) a beneficent work; the only doubt being as to
whether the work is or is not proceeding fast enough to overtake
and counteract the forces that make for degradation.[49]
This, I say, is doubtful; but what is scarcely doubtful is that the
South, for its own sake, cannot suffer Mr. Bruce’s prophecy to fulfil
itself. The gist of the forecast is, briefly, this: the rural negro, who is
admittedly prolific, and whose children survive in fair proportions,
will gradually be driven into the towns, where all possible influences
are leagued against his moral and physical well-being, and where
the rate of negro mortality, both infant and adult, is always very high
and often appalling. Thus, according to Mr. Bruce, the “Afro-
American” is being inexorably hounded into the jaws of death, and
must in due time perish from off the face of the earth. But what is to
be the state of the South while this amiable prophecy is working
itself out? If the towns are the jaws of death to the negro, what are
they to the white man and his children? Putting all question of
humanity aside, can any sane civic policy permit negroes to crowd in
their thousands into city slums, and there to die like flies in
conditions “even more unwholesome and squalid” than those which
at present obtain? Why is the rate of negro mortality so high? Simply
because the black folk are less able than the whites to resist the
poisonous influences of bad sanitation, moral as well as physical. But
bad sanitation, though it may be more fatal to one race than to the
other, inevitably takes its toll of both. Hear what a Southern health
officer has to say on this point:

We face the following issues: First: one set of people, the

Caucasian, with a normal death-rate of less than 16 per thousand
per annum, and right alongside of them is the negro race, with a
death-rate of 25 to 30 per thousand. Second: the first-named race
furnishing a normal, and the second race an abnormal, percentage
of criminals.... The negro is with you for all time. He is what you will
make him, and it is “up to” the white people to prevent him from
becoming a criminal, and to guard him against tuberculosis, syphilis,
etc. If he is tainted with disease, you will suffer: if he develops
criminal tendencies, you will be affected.

What can be more certain than this? And is it to be conceived that

the South will deliberately refrain from looking to its physical and
moral sewerage until the negro shall have been killed off?[50]
It is not to be conceived, and it is not what is happening. Better
sanitary conditions are everywhere being secured, though the
movement is slow in the cities of the South. In the North a great
improvement has already been effected. In a report on “The Health
and Physique of the Negro American” (Atlanta University
Publications, No. XI., 1906) we read—

Ten years ago the [negro] death-rate was twice the birth-rate in
New York; to-day they are about the same, with the death-rate
steadily decreasing and the birth-rate increasing. Ten years ago the
birth-rate of Philadelphia was less than the death-rate; to-day it is
six per thousand higher.... With the improved sanitary condition,
improved education, and better economic opportunities, the
mortality of the race may, and probably will, steadily decrease until it
becomes normal.

If there is any permanence and any efficacy in the “wave of

prohibition” that is passing over the South, it must certainly cause a
great reduction in negro mortality; and it surely cannot be long
before means are found to check the vending of noxious drugs.
Unless, in short, the civilization of the South is to stand still while the
negro dies off, there seems to be little likelihood of his fulfilling Mr.
Bruce’s prognostic. This great and beautiful region cannot possibly
find its salvation in making itself a hell for the negro.
When I quoted to Mr. Booker Washington Mr. Bruce’s death-
sentence on his people, he was moved to one of his rare laughs. In
Mr. Washington’s opinion, which may very well prove to be correct,
the natural increase of the negro in the South about keeps pace with
that of the white man. The white race, however, is being largely
recruited by immigration, so that its numerical preponderance is
doubtless increasing. It would appear, then, that, unless conditions
very greatly alter, there is little chance of the black race out-breeding
and submerging the white, but equally little chance of the black race
being obliging enough to die out. “Conservative” statisticians
estimate that at the close of this century there will be anywhere
from twenty-five to thirty-five million negroes in America.[51]
Taking the Southern States at large, then, we find that one person
out of every three is wholly or partly of African blood. It is
sometimes maintained that really pure-bred negroes are very rare;
but this seems to be a mistake. Professor W. E. B. Du Bois, himself a
man of mixed origin and not likely to underestimate the number of
his own class, thinks that in two-thirds of the negroes of the United
States there are no “recognizable traces” of white blood. He adds
that white blood doubtless exists in many who show no trace of it;
but for practical purposes this speculation may be disregarded. I
think we may take it as pretty certain that if, in the South, one
person out of every three is of African descent, one person out of
every four is either actually or virtually a full-blooded negro. But it
must not be supposed that the distribution of the races is by any
means even. Some districts, such as the mountainous regions of
Tennessee and West Virginia, contain hardly any negroes; while in
other districts, not a few, the blacks largely outnumber the whites.
These are, no doubt, the districts in which the pure-bred black most
abounds.
Is there a “Negro Problem”?
Having ascertained, approximately, the numerical relations of the
two races, we are now in a position to consider the problem or
problems involved. And first we are confronted with the question, “Is
there any real problem at all?”
Some people deny it, or at all events maintain that the problem is
created solely by the almost insane arrogance and inhumanity of the
Southern white man. This view lingers in the North, among the
inheritors of the old abolitionist sentiment. In England, it has been
roundly expressed by Mr. H. G. Wells, and somewhat more
considerately by even so high an authority as Sir Sydney Olivier. I
need scarcely say that it is a very popular view among the negroes
in the South itself.
For a typical (though moderate) American utterance of this opinion
the following may suffice. It is a passage from “Race Questions and
Prejudices,” by a distinguished psychologist, Professor Royce of
Harvard (International Journal of Ethics, April, 1906):

Scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out to be not so

much problems caused by anything which is essential to the
existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-
called race problems are merely the problems caused by our
antipathies.... Such antipathies will always play their part in human
history. But what we can do about them is to try not to be fooled by
them, not to take them too seriously, because of their mere name.
We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives,
phenomena on a level with a dread of snakes or of mice,
phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not
noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature.
 The attitude of the South, then, in the conception of Professor
Royce, is no more rational than that of a woman who shrieks, jumps
on a chair, and gathers her skirts about her ankles, because a mouse
happens to run across the floor. I should have thought that the wiser
tendency of modern science was to divine something more than a
“caprice” in so deep-rooted an instinct as the dread even of mice. As
for the dread of snakes, it was surely by a slip of the pen that
Professor Royce adduced it.
Not at all dissimilar is the judgment of Mr. H. G. Wells. Hearing a
great deal of loose, illogical, inconclusive talk on the colour question,
and having himself taken a “mighty liking” to these “gentle, human,
dark-skinned people” as he saw them in a Chicago music-hall and
elsewhere, Mr. Wells formed the opinion that there was no reason at
all in the Southern frame of mind. His conclusion is that “these
emotions are a cult;” and by a cult he evidently means a contagious,
fanatical folly.
Now, Mr. Wells is a man for whose essential wisdom I have a very
high respect. If I were bound to acknowledge myself the disciple of
any living thinker, I should have small hesitation in selecting him as
my guide and philosopher. But his chapter on “The Tragedy of
Colour” in “The Future in America” is tinged with what I cannot but
take to be a dogmatic impatience of all distinctions and difficulties of
race. Before writing it, he might, I think, have asked himself whether
the theory of sheer race-monomania was not, perhaps, a rather too
simple way of accounting for “emotions” felt with absolute unanimity
(in a greater or less degree) by some twenty million Southern white
people. The arguments he heard might be weak, ill-informed,
inconclusive; the conduct in which the emotions expressed
themselves might often be indefensible and abhorrent; and yet there
might lie at the root of the emotions something very different from
sheer unreason. I think Mr. Wells should have been chary of
“indicting a nation” without more careful reflection and a closer
scrutiny of evidence.
Sir Sydney Olivier, on the other hand, speaks with the authority of
one who has spent many years in close contact with negroes, having
been a successful administrator of large communities in which they
greatly preponderate. It is impossible to suspect him of hastiness or
of à priori doctrinairism. What, then, is his view? In his “White
Capital and Coloured Labour” (1907), he tells us that both in visiting
the United States and in discussing race questions with American
visitors to Jamaica, “he found himself, as a British West Indian,
unable to entirely account for an attitude of mind which impressed
him as superstitious, if not hysterical, and as indicating
misapprehensions of premises very ominous for the United States of
the future.” He proceeds:

The theory held in the Southern States of America and in some

British Colonies, comes, in substance, to this—that the negro is an
inferior order in nature to the white man, in the same sense that the
ape may be said to be so. It is really upon this theory that American
negrophobia rests, and not only upon the viciousness or criminality
of the negro. This viciousness and criminality are, in fact, largely
invented, imputed, and exaggerated, in order to support and justify
the propaganda of race exclusiveness (p. 43).

And again, in another part of his book:

My argument has been that race prejudice is the fetish of the man
of short views; and that it is a short-sighted and suicidal creed, with
no healthy future for the community that entertains it (p. 173).

I have very real diffidence in contesting the deliberate judgment of

a man like Sir Sydney Olivier on a question which he has deeply
studied; but I cannot believe with him that the problem is simply one
of Southern unwisdom. On the contrary, I believe that, however
unwise in much of her talk and her action, the South is in the main
animated by a just and far-feeling, if not far-seeing, instinct. That
there has been an infinitude of tragic unwisdom in the matter, not in
the South alone, no one nowadays denies. But I believe that the
problem, far from being unreal, is so real and so dishearteningly
difficult that nothing but an almost superhuman wisdom, energy,
and courage will ever effectually deal with it.
 Let me try to give my reasons for this belief.
White Man’s Land or Brown Man’s Land?
No one, I suppose—not even Mr. Wells—would deny that the
importation of the African into America was an egregious blunder as
well as a monstrous crime. Without him the South would perhaps
have developed more slowly during the eighteenth century; but she
would have escaped the arrest of development which sums up her
history during the nineteenth century. She would have escaped the
war by which she strove, with misguided heroism, to perpetuate that
arrest of development. She would have escaped the “horrors” of that
Reconstruction period which still haunts her memory like a
nightmare. She would have escaped the prostration and
impoverishment from which she is only now beginning—though very
rapidly—to recover. The negro has assuredly been her calamity in
the past. To say, as negro writers often do, that he has created her
wealth, is to ignore the appalling price she has paid for him. Much
more truly may he be said to have created her poverty.[52]
This, however, is certainly not the negro’s fault. He did not thrust
himself upon the South: he was no willing immigrant. Historic
recriminations, therefore, are perfectly idle—as idle as the attempts
of Southern writers to shift responsibility for the slave trade to the
shoulders of the New England States. I cast a glance back at history
merely to remind the reader that the presence of the negro in
America is not the result of a natural movement, an inevitable
expansion, a migration springing from economic necessity or from
deep impulses of folk-psychology. It is, on the contrary, the outcome
of what may almost be called a disastrous accident—of inhuman
cupidity in the slave-dealers and economic short-sightedness in the
slave-owners.
The upshot, as we find it to-day, is that in a magnificent country,
well outside the torrid zone, and eminently suited to be the home of
a white race, one person in every three is coloured, and one person
in every four is physically indistinguishable from an African savage. It
would be the extravagance of paradox to maintain that this is a
positively desirable condition, preferable to that of a country which
presents a normal uniformity of complexion. England, for instance,
would certainly not be a more desirable place of residence if one-
fourth of her population were transmuted into the semblance of
Dahomeyans, even supposing that the metamorphosis involved no
moral or intellectual change for the worse. A monochrome
civilization is on the face of it preferable to such a piebald civilization
as at present exists in the Southern States.
Here at once, then, we have a difference between the South and
the West Indies, which Sir Sydney Olivier seems strangely to
overlook. The West Indies are not climatically fitted to be a “white
man’s land”; or, if it was ever possible that they should become one,
the chance was lost at the very outset of their history. They are once
for all black men’s lands, with a sprinkling of whites governing and
exploiting them. It would be much more reasonable for the black to
chafe under the dominance of the white, than for the white to resent
the presence of the black. But the case in the Southern States is
absolutely different. They were explored, settled, organized by white
men; by white men their liberties were vindicated. They are fitted by
their climate and resources to be not only a white man’s land, but
one of the greatest white men’s lands in the world. The black man
came there only as a (terribly ill-chosen) tool for their development.
When the tool ceases to be a tool and claims a third part of the
heritage, the “peripeteia” is no doubt dramatic and exceedingly
moral, but none the less exasperating to a generation which, after
all, was personally innocent of the original crime-blunder. No one
enjoys playing the scapegoat in a moral apologue; and the Southern
white man would be more than human if he accepted the part with
perfect equanimity. At any rate, the West Indian white man has no
right to assume an air of superior virtue until the conditions of his
case are even remotely analogous. The negro in the West Indies is
the essence and foundation of life: in the United States he is a
regrettable accident.
Four Possibilities: I. Extinction.
It is time now that we should look more closely into the conditions
of this piebald community which a violent interference with the
normal course of race-distribution has established in the Southern
States.
 The future seems to contain four possibilities, or, rather,
conceivabilities, which may be examined in turn.
(1) Things may “worry along” in the present profoundly
unsatisfactory condition, until the negro gradually dies out.
(2) The education of both races, and the moral and economic
elevation of the black race, may gradually enable them to live side
by side in mutual tolerance and forbearance, without mingling, but
without clashing.
(3) Marriage between persons of the two races may—I mean
might conceivably—be legalized, and the colour-line obliterated by
“miscegenation.”
(4) The negro race might be geographically segregated, by
deportation or otherwise, and established in a community or
communities of its own.
The first eventuality—the evanescence of the negro race—we have
already examined and seen to be highly improbable. Let me only
add here that there is one way in which it might conceivably be
brought about—a way too horrible to be contemplated, yet not
wholly beyond the bounds of possibility. The recurrence of such an
outbreak as the Atlanta riot of 1906 might lead to very terrible
consequences. On that occasion the white mob found the negroes
unarmed, and wreaked its frenzy practically unopposed. But the
lesson was not lost on the negroes, and a similar onslaught would,
in many places, find them armed and capable of a certain amount of
resistance. In that case one dares not think what might happen.
Their resistance could scarcely be effectual, in the sense of
intimidating and checking white violence. It would, on the contrary,
infuriate the mob, and lend some show of justification to their
proceedings; while the frenzy would spread from city to city, and the
result might quite well be one of the darkest pages in American or
any other history. Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed
negroes in any city of the South, and a flame would burst out all
over the land which would work untold devastation before either
authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as
a declaration of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist
on searching for arms in the negro quarters; the negroes would
inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive organization; and
the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity
to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the
race, or a tenth part of the race, be violently wiped out; but they
might be so dismayed and terrorized as to lose that natural
buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled
them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already
read hopelessness and a prescience of doom in the negro tone of
mind; but, so far, I think the wish is father to the thought. The race,
as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would their
spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic
Negerhetze? I doubt it; and I believe it possible that in this way Mr.
P. A. Bruce’s prophecy might be realized more rapidly than he
anticipated.
It would be an exaggeration to say that the South lives on the
brink of such a horror; but there is no denying that the elements are
present which might one day bring it to pass.[53] Sir Sydney Olivier is
quite right in calling the feeling of a large class of Southerners
towards the negro “hysterical” and ungoverned; and this is just the
class that is handiest with its “guns.” Long and laborious treatises
have been written to prove, on Biblical evidence, that the negro is a
“beast,” and, on scientific evidence, that he is more nearly an ape
than a man. These works, no doubt, are scarcely sane; but their
insanity is by no means peculiar to their individual authors. The word
“extermination” is gravely spoken by men who are not therefore held
to be maniacs or even monomaniacs. The South, says Mr. W. E. B.
Du Bois, is “simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk”; and
where such a condition prevails, the possibility of sudden disaster is
never far off. To recognize the possibility is not to bring it nearer, but
rather to indicate the urgent need of measures that shall place it
infinitely remote.
 Four Possibilities: II. The Atlanta Compromise.
We pass now to the second eventuality—the gradual smoothing
away of friction, so that the two races may live side by side, never
blending and yet never jarring. This is the conception set forth in Mr.
Booker Washington’s celebrated “Atlanta Compromise” speech of
1895, wherein he said, “In all things purely social we can be as
separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress.” Is this a possible—I will not say ideal,
for that it manifestly is not—but a possible working arrangement?
One thing is evident at the outset—namely, that the fourteen
years that have elapsed since Mr. Washington uttered this aspiration
have brought its fulfilment no nearer. Both negro education and
white education have advanced in the interim; the “respectable” and
well-to-do class of negroes has considerably increased; but the
feeling between the races is worse rather than better. Mr. Thomas
Nelson Page used to say, “Northerners espouse the cause of the
negro as a race, but dislike negroes individually; while Southerners
do not dislike negroes individually, but oppose them as a race.”[54]
Ten years ago there was a large element of truth in this saying; but
it becomes less and less true with every year that passes. The old-
time kindliness of feeling between the ex-owner and the ex-slave is
rapidly becoming a mere tradition. No common memories or
sentiments hold together the new generations of the two races; they
are growing up in unmitigated mutual antipathy. At best, indeed, the
Southern kindliness of feeling towards the individual negro subsisted
only so long as he “knew his place” and kept it; and the very process
of education and elevation on which Mr. Washington relies renders
the negro ever less willing to keep the place the Southern white man
assigns him. In the North, too, while the dislike of the individual has
greatly increased, the theoretic fondness for the race has very
perceptibly cooled. Altogether, the tendency of events since 1895
has not been at all in the direction of the Atlanta Compromise. The
Atlanta riot of eleven years later was a grimly ironic comment on Mr.
Washington’s speech.
This merely means, it may be said, that education has as yet
produced no sensible effect upon the inveterate and inhuman
prejudice of the South. Nevertheless, time and patience may justify
Mr. Washington’s optimism. There is no saying, indeed, what a great
deal of time and a great deal of patience may not effect. Meanwhile,
let us see what is really involved in the idea of the Atlanta
Compromise.
We are to conceive, in the first place, an immense advance in the
negro race—an advance in education, industry, thrift, and general
efficiency. Well, this is possible enough—the negro is certainly
civilizable, if not indefinitely, at any rate far beyond the average level
he has yet attained. Negro crime might easily be reduced within
normal limits; for the race is not inherently criminal, but is rendered
so by ignorance, poverty, vice, injustice, and a thoroughly bad penal
system. The next fifty years, if present influences continue to work
unimpeded, may see a very large increase in the class of law-
abiding, property-holding negroes, and possibly a considerable
improvement even in the condition of the black proletariat. But
supposing that, by the exercise of infinite patience for fifty or a
hundred years, a condition something like that indicated in the
Atlanta formula were ultimately attained, would it be desirable? and
could it be permanent?
The assumed improvement of conditions would, of course, imply a
steady increase in the numbers of the black race; so that, even with
the aid of immigration, the white race would probably not greatly
add to its numerical superiority. Let us suppose that at the end of
fifty years the coloured people were not as one in three, but as one
in four, and that this ratio remained pretty constant. Here, then, we
should have a nation within a nation, unassimilated and (by
hypothesis) unassimilable, occupying one-fourth of the whole field of
existence, and performing no function that could not, in their
absence, be at least as well performed by assimilable people, whose
presence would be a strength to the community.[55] The black nation
would be a hampering, extraneous element in the body politic, like a
bullet encysted in the human frame. It may lie there for years
without setting up inflammation or gangrene, and causing no more
than occasional twinges of pain; but it certainly cannot contribute to
the health, efficiency, or comfort of the organism. Is it wonderful
that the Atlanta Compromise, supposing it realized in all conceivable
perfection, should excite little enthusiasm in the white South?
But to imagine it realized in perfection is to imagine an
impossibility—almost a contradiction in terms. We are, on the one
hand, to suppose the negro ambitious, progressive, prosperous, and,
on the other hand, to imagine him humbly acquiescent in his status
as a social pariah. The thing is out of the question; such saintlike
humility has long ceased to form any part of the moral equipment of
the American negro. The bullet could never be thoroughly encysted;
it would always irritate, rankle, fester. Mr. Washington’s formula in
renouncing social equality is judiciously vague as to political rights.
But one thing is certain—neither Mr. Washington nor any other negro
leader really contemplates their surrender. It is quite inconceivable
that the nation within a nation should acquiesce in disfranchisement;
and the question of the negro vote will always be a disturbing factor
in Southern political life. Either he must be jockeyed out of it by
devices abhorrent to democratic principle and more or less
subversive of political morality; or, if he be honestly suffered to cast
his ballot, he will block the healthy divergence of political opinion in
the South, since, in any party conflict, he would hold the balance
between the two sides, and thus become the dominant power in the
State. This will always be a danger so long as the unassimilated
negro is forced, by his separateness, to think and act first as a negro
and only in the second place as an American. Even if the Atlanta
Compromise were otherwise realizable, the friction at this point
would always continue acute.
 The Crux of the Problem.
The worst, however, remains behind. If the Atlanta Compromise
were possible in every other way, it would be impossible on the side
of sex. For two races to dwell side by side in large numbers, and to
be prohibited from coming together in legal marriage, is
unwholesome and demoralizing to both. I am not thinking mainly of
what Mr. Ray Stannard Baker calls “the tragedy of the mulatto.” It
seems hard, no doubt, that marriage should be impossible between
a white man and a girl in whose complexion, perhaps, an eighth or
sixteenth part of negro blood is entirely imperceptible; but such
cases are romantic exceptions, and do not constitute a serious factor
in the problem. Negroes, at any rate, will tell you proudly that the
young men and women of their race, however light-skinned, hold it
no hardship that their choice of mates should be restricted to their
own people. Whatever be the truth as to these marginal relations,
they are not the essence of the matter. The essence is simply this:
the youth and manhood of the white South is subjected to an
altogether unfair and unwholesome ordeal by the constant presence
of a multitude of physically well-developed women, among whom, in
the lower levels, there is no strong tradition of chastity, and to whom
the penalties of incontinence are very slight. To say, as many
Southerners will, that there is no such thing as virtue among negro
women is stupidly libellous; but it is impossible to doubt that the
average standard of sexual conduct among the lower orders of the
black and brown population is anything but high. And this is not a
state of things that can be radically amended in one generation or in
two. The completest realization of the Atlanta Compromise that is
conceivable within, say, a century, would still leave the white male
exposed, from boyhood upward, to a stimulation of his animal
instincts which, in the peculiar circumstances of the case, cannot be
otherwise than unwholesome.
 We are here at the very heart of the problem. All other relations
are adjustable, at a certain sacrifice; but not this one. If the two
races are to live together without open and lawful intermingling, it
must be at the cost of incessant demoralization to both.
“Miscegenation,” in the sense of permanent concubinage and the
rearing of hybrid families, may be held in check by the strong social
sentiment against it,[56] but nothing can hold in check the still more
degrading casual commerce between the white man (and youth) and
the coloured woman. It is probably this fact, quite as much as the
hideous proclivities of the criminal negro male, that hardens the
heart of the white woman against the black race. Nor is the
unwholesomeness of the condition measured by the actual amount
of laxity to which it leads. Temptation may in myriads of cases be
resisted; but this order of temptation ought not to be in the air.[57] It
cannot be good for any race of men to be surrounded by strongly-
accentuated Sex, which, for ulterior reasons, whereof the mere
animal nature takes little account, is placed under a tabu.
I venture to say that no one—not even Mr. Washington himself—
really believes in the Atlanta Compromise as a stable solution of the
problem. The negroes who accept it as an interim ideal (so to
speak), never doubt that it is but a stepping-stone to freedom of
racial intermixture. They see that so long as constant physical
propinquity endures, the colour barrier between the sexes is
factitious, and in great measure unreal, and they believe that at last
the race-pride of the white man will be worn down, and he will
accept the inevitable amalgamation.[58] The ultimate forces at war in
the South are the instinctive, half-conscious desire of the black race
to engraft itself on the white stock,[59] and the no less instinctive
horror of the white stock at such a surrender of its racial integrity.
This horror is all the more acute—all the more morbid, if you will—
because the white race is conscious of its own frailty, and knows that
it is, in some sense, fighting a battle against perfidious nature. It is a
hard thing to say, but I have little doubt it is true, that much of the
injustice and cruelty to which the negro is subjected in the South is a
revenge, not so much for sexual crime on the negro’s part, as for an
uneasy conscience or consciousness on the part of the whites.[60] It
is because the black race inevitably appeals to one order of low
instincts in the white, that it suffers from the sympathetic stimulation
of another order of low instincts.
 Four Possibilities: III. Amalgamation.
This brings us, of course, to the third of the conceivabilities above
enumerated—the legalization of marriage between the two races. To
the white South, nothing is more inconceivable: to the critics of the
white South, nothing is more simple. Which of them is in the right?
It is significant that none of these outside critics puts the slightest
faith in the Atlanta Compromise. They see quite clearly that the two
races cannot live together and yet apart. Their solution is the
obvious one of free intermixture, and they cannot understand why
the South should be so inveterately opposed to it. Why make such a
fuss, they say, over such a simple matter?
And then comes a long array of arguments to minimize, in
general, the significance of race, and, in particular, the gap between
the white race and the black. Racial purity is a vain imagination;
there is no such thing, at any rate among European peoples; and if it
existed it would only be a limitation and a misfortune to the people
afflicted with it. Most of all is the Anglo-Saxon race ridiculed as a
historic fallacy. The South, which boasts itself almost the last
stronghold of pure Anglo-Saxondom,[61] is told that the pure Anglo-
Saxon is a myth and a superstition. As to the negro, we are assured
that we were all negroes once, or something very much to that
effect. At any rate, it is asserted that the Mediterranean races, with
whom Western civilization originated, were in great part of negro
origin. Skull-measurement and brain-weight are called in to prove—
whatever the particular disputant wants to prove. Special qualities
are claimed for the negro—such as a rich imagination, an innate
courtesy, and a strong musical faculty; and it is argued that these
are the very things of which the (so-called) Anglo-Saxon race stands
most in need. Great play is made with the quasi-scientific modern
Rousseauism which avers that our barbarian ancestors were better
men than we, and thence argues that there is little or no real gap
between the savage of to-day and the civilized man. Weismannism is
pressed into the service to show that, as the aptitudes and
tendencies that we sum up in the word civilization are acquired and
therefore (it is argued) untransmissible, the white child can have
profited nothing by its ancestors’ centuries of upward struggle from
barbarism, while the black child cannot be in any way handicapped
by his descent through untold ages of savagery. We are even
assured that civilization has sprung from and must be maintained by
“the commingling of all with all, the general ‘panmixture,’ the
universal ‘half-breed.’”[62]
Fortunately it is quite unnecessary that I should plunge into the
mazes of ethnological controversy. It is sufficient for my present
purpose to note that controversy, and very lively controversy, exists.
The practical equality of the two races is so far from being a point on
which all authorities are agreed, that it may rather be called a
paradox which charms a certain order of mind by reason of its very
audacity. So, too, with the opinion that, whether the African race be
or be not inferior, it possesses qualities that the European stock
needs, and ought to accept with gratitude. Whether true or false,
this is, at present at any rate, a quite undemonstrated speculation.
Even Sir Sydney Olivier, who maintains in general that a man of
mixed race is “potentially a more competent vehicle of humanity,”
advances no proof of the benefits of the particular mixture in
question which can for a moment be expected to carry conviction to
the Southern white man. The South, then, is urged by the
amalgamation theorists to embark upon, or submit to, what is at
best a great experiment. It is to quell its higher instincts (for so it
regards them, rightly or wrongly) and commit what it feels in the
marrow of its bones to be a degrading race-abnegation, in deference
to a half-scientific, half-humanitarian opinion, held by certain
theorists outside its own boundaries, to the effect that, after all,
there is no great difference between black and white, and that the
complexion of the future will certainly be a uniform yellow. Can any
one blame the South for answering: “No, thank you! If you in
England or in New England are tired of being white men, and sigh
for the blessings of an African blend, we can send you several million
negroes, of both sexes, who will no doubt be happy, on suitable
terms, to intermarry with your sons and daughters. For our part, we
are content with our complexion as it is. We see no reason to believe
that the African slave trade was the means adopted by a beneficent
Providence for the ultimate improvement of our Anglo-Saxon stock;
nor, on the other hand, can we accept it as a just punishment for the
sins of our fathers that our race, as a race, should be merged and
obliterated in indiscriminate hybridism.”
I do not pretend, of course, that the fixed antipathy of the South
to the very idea of amalgamation is a purely rational one. Who is so
foolish as to look for pure reason in aught that concerns the obscure
fundamentals of life? What I am trying to show is that, whatever
irrational elements may mingle with it, the Southern sentiment has a
solid and sufficient nucleus of reason. The advantages of fusion, as
between such antipodal races as the white European and the black
African, are, to say the least of it, unproved; and a race may be
forgiven, surely, which declines to try on its own body, so to speak,
so problematic and so irremediable an experiment. For, once made,
this experiment cannot be unmade. The South must choose between
definitely renouncing its position as a “white man’s land” or
struggling to maintain it. What wonder if it feels that it has no choice
in the matter?
 The Races not Equal.
I have stated the case at the very lowest in saying that the
advantages of fusion are unproved. Though it is not essential to my
position, I must confess that my personal belief goes much further,
and that the disadvantages of fusion are, to my thinking, proved
beyond all reasonable doubt. I have not hitherto emphasized the
essential and innate inferiority of the negro race, because my
argument did not demand it. But the fact of this inferiority seems to
me as evident as it is inevitable. However fallacious may be the
boundaries between this and that European race, the boundary
between the European and the African is real, and not to be argued
away. The European is the fruit of untold generations of upward
struggle, the African of untold generations of immobility. At the very
dawn of history, the ancestors of the white American had advanced
to a point beyond that which the ancestors of the Afro-American had
attained when they were shipped across the Atlantic from fifty to
two hundred years ago. That the negro race has some very amiable
qualities is not denied. It is not denied that civilization has brought
with it certain disadvantages and corruptions, and that the white
savage is in some ways a more deplorable phenomenon than the
black savage. Nor is it denied that the negro, in virtue of his strong
imitative instinct, has, in many cases, shown a remarkable power of
taking on a certain measure of civilization. But all this does not
practically lessen the huge historic gap between the two races. Even
if we admit the innate power of the negro to overtake the white man
in intellectual grasp and moral stability, we must in reason allow him
a few centuries to make up his millenniums of arrearage. Whatever
it may become in the course of ten or fifteen generations, the negro
race here and now is inferior to the white race, not only because of
its “previous condition of servitude,” but, ultimately and
fundamentally, because of its recent condition of savagery.
Therefore, the white race, in accepting amalgamation, would be
derogating from its birthright and climbing down the scale of
humanity.
Our theorists are, on the whole, too much inclined to confound
instinct with prejudice. It is absurd to class as pure prejudice the
white man’s preference for the colour and facial contour of his race.
This is no place for an analysis of our sense of beauty; but to
maintain offhand that it is an unmeaning product of sheer habit,
with no biological justification, is simply to shirk the problem and
postpone analysis to dogma. Does any one really believe that the
genius of Cæsar and Napoleon, of Milton and Goethe, had nothing to
do with their facial angle, and could have found an equally
convenient habitation behind thick lips and under woolly skulls? The
negro himself (as distinct from the mulatto rhetorician) takes his
stand on no such paradox. Whoever may doubt the superiority of
the white race, it is not he; and it is a racial, not merely a social or
economic superiority to which he does instinctive homage. It does
not enter his head to champion his own racial ideal, to set up an
African Venus in rivalry to the Hellenic, and claim a new Judgment of
Paris between them. If wishing could change the Ethiopian’s skin
there would be never a negro in America.[63] The black race, out of
its poverty, spends thousands of dollars annually on “anti-kink”
lotions, vainly supposed to straighten the African wool.[64] The brown
belle tones her complexion with pearl powder; and many a black
mother takes pride in the brown skin of her offspring, though it
proclaims their illegitimacy. There can be no reasonable doubt that
amalgamation, in the negro’s eyes, means an enormous gain to his
race. It means ennoblement, transfiguration. It is quite natural that
he should not too curiously inquire whether the gain to him would
involve a corresponding loss to the white man. That is the white
man’s business, not his. The one thing his instinct tells him is that, if
he can break down the white man’s resistance and make the
Southern States a brown or yellow man’s land, he will have achieved
a splendid racial triumph.
 The Case for the Mulatto.
It is urged, as we have already seen, that the black man’s gain
would not be the white man’s loss, but that the black race would
bring to the white certain qualities of which it stands sorely in need,
the result of the mixture being a more competent “vehicle of all the
qualities and powers that we imply by humanity.” Has experience
justified this speculation? We have ample experience to go upon—in
South America, in the West Indies, in the Southern States
themselves. The mulatto exists and has existed for generations, not
in hundreds or thousands, but in millions; in what respect has he
proved himself superior to the pure Spaniard, or Portuguese, or
Anglo-Saxon? Does South American history bear testimony to his
political competence? Have his achievements in science, in art, in
literature, in music, been superior to those of the un-Africanized
peoples? Or, waiving the question of superiority, has he even, in
these domains, produced meritorious work in any fair proportion to
his numbers? I do not say that it is impossible to make a sort of case
for him, by the ransacking of records and the employment of a very
indefinite standard of values. But I do most emphatically say that no
conspicuous and undeniable advantage has resulted from the
blending of bloods, such as can or ought to counteract the
instinctive repugnance of the South.
In a work entitled “Twentieth Century Negro Literature,”[65]
published in 1901, Mr. Edward E. Cooper, a mulatto journalist,
quotes Byron’s lines:—

“You have the letters Cadmus gave;

Think ye he meant them for a slave?”

and then comments as follows:—

 Now Cadmus was a black African slave, captured in war; so was
Æsop, the world’s greatest fabulist; so was Terence, among the
grandest of Rome’s lyric poets; so was Pushkin, the national poet to-
day of Russia; so was Alexandre Dumas, the first, the greatest, not
only of French novelists, but of novelists of all times, and the infinite
storehouse from which all novelists draw, Honoré de Balzac and
Charles Dickens to the contrary notwithstanding.

This writer can scarcely mean what he says—namely, that

Alexandre Dumas and the rest were all black African slaves captured
in war. We must interpret him liberally, and take him to be simply
asserting the literary genius of the African race, whether pure or
blended. A better case than this might doubtless be made for it; but
a ten times better case would still be very far from a good case. And
Mr. Edward E. Cooper is a fair average specimen of the negro
champion of negro genius. Another spokesman of the race, by the
way, in the same collection of essays, argues that if the Southern
clergy had done their duty in denouncing lynching, there would have
been no assassination of President McKinley, “nor would there be
anywhere such an illiberal public sentiment as would openly criticize
our Chief Executive for dining a representative member of the race
whose feasts even Jupiter did not disdain to grace.”[66]
 A Biological Argument.
To wind up this attempt to place on a basis of reason the Southern
horror of amalgamation, I return for a moment to Sir Sydney
Olivier’s argument on the point.[67] He says:—

There may naturally be aversion on the part of and a strong social

objection on behalf of the white woman against her marriage with a
black or coloured man. There is no correspondingly strong instinctive
aversion, nor is there so strong an ostensible social objection to a
white man’s marrying a woman of mixed descent. The latter kind of
union is much more likely to occur than the former. There is good
biological reason for this distinction. Whatever the potentialities of
the African stocks as a vehicle for human manifestation, and I myself
believe them to be exceedingly important and valuable, ... the white
races are now, in fact, by far the farther advanced in effectual
human development, and it would be expedient on this account
alone that their maternity should be economized to the utmost. A
woman may be the mother of a limited number of children, and our
notion of the number advisable is contracting: it is bad natural
economy, and instinct very potently opposes it, to breed backwards
from her. There is no such reason against the begetting of children
by white men in countries where, if they are to breed at all, it must
be with women of coloured or mixed races. The offspring of such
breeding, whether legitimate or illegitimate, is, from the point of
view of efficiency, an acquisition to the community, and under
favourable conditions, an advance on the pure-bred African.

To this I have nothing to object, save that it manifestly and in its

very terms does not apply to the Southern States of America. Sir
Sydney does not intend it so to apply; but when he proceeds to
speak of the Southern States, he somehow neglects to draw the
necessary distinctions. The conditions he has in mind in the above
paragraph are those of a black man’s land, not of a white man’s
land. It may readily be granted that a fundamentally black
community gains by the infusion of white blood, though the
circumstances of the “first cross” are scarcely agreeable to civilized
sentiment. There can be little beyond sheer animalism in the
relations between a white man and a black woman; and such
parentage cannot be reckoned the most desirable. This feeling,
however, is perhaps a mere superstition; the science of eugenics is
not yet far enough advanced, I take it, to afford us any authoritative
guidance. Sir Sydney Olivier, at all events, rejects without hesitation
the view that the mulatto is inferior, not only to the white, but to the
pure black. The mulatto element in a black community, he maintains,
is a distinct gain; and the larger it is the better. So far, I am quite
willing to follow him; but surely the same process of reasoning,
applied to a white community, must lead to exactly the opposite
conclusion. It is this fundamental distinction between a black and
white community that Sir Sidney either ignores, or declines to take
into account. The South is obviously not a country where, “if white
men are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured races.” It
is a country where a pure white race increases rapidly in spite of the
disturbance (economic and sexual) undoubtedly set up by the
constant propinquity of a black race. In bygone days, when the black
race was a herd of human chattels, with no political or social rights,
a great deal of intermixture took place. It was, as Sir Sydney would
doubtless admit, morally bestial and degrading; but on the principles
he lays down, and on the assumption that slavery was part of the
eternal scheme of things, it was probably good policy, inasmuch as it
improved the breed of the black community—the community of
slaves.[68] But when the black community ceased to be, in its very
nature, a thing apart—when its members became freemen and
citizens, indistinguishable, in constitutional theory, from members of
the white community—then the conditions entirely altered. It was
one thing to produce a superior breed of slaves; it is quite another
to go on producing an inferior breed of citizens, and to legalize the
production of such a breed. “But I deny the inferiority!” Sir Sydney
may say. “I contend that the good qualities of the white race are
preserved, and are reinforced by the addition of certain very
valuable qualities which are the special endowment of the black
race.” It is not very easy to see why, if this argument hold good, Sir
Sydney should discountenance the mating of the black man with the
white woman. Either the African strain is valuable or it is not; if it is,
why should there be any “bad natural economy” in such unions?
Waiving this point, however, I think we have already seen pretty
clearly why Sir Sydney’s argument meets with scant acceptance in
the South. The plain reason is that it opposes to a deep-rooted
instinct a wholly unproved speculation. The South has not
discovered, in its own pretty considerable experience, the
advantages of hybridism as compared with purity of white blood; nor
does Sir Sydney himself advance anything that can possibly be called
proof of his opinion. A white nation can scarcely be expected to
renounce its racial integrity on the chance of breeding an occasional
Alexandre Dumas.
Sir Sydney Olivier’s biological principle, strictly and consistently
applied, would issue in a law making marriage legal between any
male and a female lower in the colour scale than himself, but illegal
between any female and a male with a larger proportion of African
blood. Such a law would, of course, be absolutely impossible of
enforcement; and equally inconceivable in practice would be any
other partial and restricted legalization of inter-racial unions. There is
no middle course between a resolute maintenance of the legal
barrier between the races and a complete acceptance of the
principle of amalgamation. If the legal barrier were ever removed, it
would mean such a relaxation of public sentiment as would insure
the very rapid increase of the hybrid race.[69] Three or four
generations would see the South a brown man’s land, with, no
doubt, a rapidly narrowing white aristocracy. In another three or four
generations the prevailing complexion of the North would be sensibly
affected; and, finally, the whole American nation would be typically
negroid, the pure white man being the more or less rare exception.
For my part, I cannot but sympathize with the sentiment that
violently repudiates such a contingency. I do not understand how
any white man who has ever visited the South can fail to be
dismayed at the thought of absorbing into the veins of his race the
blood of the African myriads who swarm on every hand.
For the South itself, at any rate, the discussion is purely academic.
Amalgamation is a thousand leagues remote from the sphere of
practical politics. I have been endeavouring to state for outsiders the
case of the South as I understand it. I may have stated it wrongly,
or understated it; but no one can possibly overstate the resolve of
the South that the colour line shall not be obliterated by
“miscegenation.”
 Four Possibilities: IV. Segregation.
Lastly, we have to consider the fourth conceivable eventuality—the
geographical segregation of the negro race, whether within or
without the limits of the United States.
This is usually ridiculed as an absolutely Utopian scheme, and at
the outset of my investigation I myself regarded it in that light. But
the more I saw and read and thought, the oftener and the more
urgently did segregation recur to me as the one possible way of
escape from an otherwise intolerable situation. Not, of course, the
instant, and wholesale, and violent deportation of ten million people
—that is a rank impossibility. Between that and inert acquiescence in
the ubiquity of the negro throughout the Southern States, there are
many middle courses; and I cannot but believe that the first really
great statesman who arises in America will prove his greatness by
grappling with this vast but not insoluble problem. And, assuredly,
the sooner he comes the better.
We have seen that the negro race is not dying out, or that, if it
does die out, it can only be, so to speak, at the cost of Southern
civilization—through the indefinite continuance of insanitary and
barbarous conditions. We have seen that the Atlanta Compromise is
illusory and impracticable, that there is no reasonable hope that the
two races will ever live together, yet apart—in economic solidarity,
yet without social or sexual contact. We have seen that the essence
of the whole situation lies in the negro’s inevitable ambition (even
though it be unformulated and largely unconscious) to be drawn
upward, through physical coalescence, into the white race, and the
white man’s intense resolve that, on a large and determining scale,
no such coalescence shall take place. Now this state of war—for
such it undoubtedly is—will not correct itself by lapse of time. It will
continue to degrade and demoralize both races until active measures
are taken to put an end to it. Though I sympathize with the white
man’s horror of amalgamation, I neither approve nor extenuate the
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