Our glorious Semper Eadem,
The banner of our pride!
—but while it remains in the hand of those who hold it to-day she can but follow the march of humanity, from its rear.
While England is given over to the hands of a plutocracy, she cannot lead or guide other nations on the path towards freedom.
We are trying to save ourselves: let her try to save herself.
NOTE B
THE VALUE OF HUMAN VARIETIES (1901)
When chapter III was first published several years ago as an article in an English review, slight and perfunctory as is its manner of dealing with the vast question of the intermingling of distinct human breeds, I was surprised at the number of letters I received from every part of the world, written by persons themselves of mixed varieties. It was as though the passing reference to a subject seldom dealt with had removed a valve, allowing free utterance to much pent-up feeling. Had these letters not been confidential, and therefore unpublishable, they would have formed an invaluable commentary on the article.
"Why," writes in effect a cultured and intellectual man of mingled race, the son of an English planter and a pure Negro woman in the West Indies, but who had received a university training in Europe, "Why should I have anything to do with that dark race which I hate and loathe and despise, and not cling wholly to that white race which I love and admire?" And yet he adds later, "There are moments of bitterness when I feel I could break wholly with my father's people and throw my lot in with my mother's, and live for them and with them. They would not despise me. And yet the shrinking from them is too intense."
The first of these sentences throws a strong light on the mental attitude from which arise the mingled sorrows and wrongs of the man of dark and light blood at the present day, and which rises, as we have said, not so much from the manner in which other men regard him as from the attitude he assumes towards one part of himself; while the last sentence indicates perhaps the only manner in which the inter-breeding of widely distinct varieties might, even at the present day, become a matter of great gain to humanity, were those of mingled blood large and strong enough to expend themselves rather in aiding and leading the weaker than in seeking to identify themselves with the, for the moment, stronger of their two parent races.