On the other hand, Hombron declares that in our colonies “Negresses and Whites show a moderate fertility; Mulatto women and Whites are extremely fertile as well as Mulatto men and women.”
“Even in such conditions of life as those of the Gulf of Mexico, the Mulatto,” according to M. Rufz, “is well developed, strong, alert, more adapted than the Negro for industrial application, and very productive.” According to M. Audain, in the Dominican Republic of St. Domingo, “one-third are Negroes, two-thirds Mulattoes, and an insignificant proportion Whites.” For a long time this population has not been fed by any fresh arrivals; its continuance is entirely due to itself.
More quotations, I think, are useless. When added to the numbers of M. Martin de Moussey, who makes no exception concerning Mulattoes, they are sufficient to demonstrate the following general fact, viz., that the Mulatto is as energetic and as fruitful as other races, at least in a very great majority of those parts of the globe where this mixed population has been formed.
IV. Nevertheless, I do not deny the facts advanced by Etwick, Long, Nott, Yvan, and Simonnot. I accept them without so much as discussing them. But what do they prove in the presence of the remaining facts which are so numerous and so conclusive? At the most that the development of the mulatto race can be favoured, retarded, or hindered by local circumstances. In other terms, that it depends upon the influences exercised by the whole of the conditions of life (milieu).
We see, then, in the formation of the mixed races, the reappearance of this element, whose action plays so large a part in the natural history of man, and great attention should be paid to it.
In the result of the crossing of the Negro and the White in Jamaica, Java, &c., its intervention could be foreseen. The two races are strangers to these countries, which are known to be very destructive to foreign races. The question of crossing is complicated in these cases, by the phenomena and difficulties of acclimatisation. Can we feel surprised that unions contracted under such conditions of existence should only present precarious guarantees for the future?
We must here, moreover, take into account an element which is constantly neglected, and whose importance in questions of this nature has always struck me strongly. I mean morality. It therefore forms one of the conditions of life (milieu). Now, if we pay attention to the details, which are not numerous, but which are very significant, given by some travellers upon the existence of Europeans in the colonies, in Jamaica in particular; if we compare these melancholy facts with those furnished by daily observation, an entirely new light will be thrown upon the questions of crossing and acclimatisation. We shall be obliged to recognise that the death of the fathers, and the extinction of the descendants, are often only the consequence of, and the punishment for, the deplorable moral conditions of life, in which they have lived.
V. But the physical conditions of life have also their peculiar action. The following example may be quoted as a proof.
M. Simonnot has noticed natives of Senegambia, “who combine a perfectly black skin, with all the characteristic forms of the Moor, even at all ages.” According to him, these black Moors are a mixed race. If this is the case, it must, at least, be recognised that the white blood predominates considerably, since all the forms belong to this type. In order that the colour of the Negro should be persistent, in spite of this profound semitic influence, a local action, that is, an action of the conditions of life, must have neutralised the ordinary laws of the mixture of races, and united the colour of one race with the features and forms of another.