A curious aversion to marriages with whites on the part both of North American Indians and of negroes is, however, recorded from time to time in the official reports of the United States Government.
Two beliefs about such unions are more or less prevalent among white men in the regions where they not infrequently occur. Neither of these beliefs is supported by anything like conclusive evidence. The one is that such unions lead to the production of relatively infertile offspring; the mixed breed or stock is said to die out after a few (some seven or eight) generations. It is, however, the fact that the circumstances under which this occurs suggest that it is not due to a natural and necessary infertility. The other assertion is that the offspring of parents—one of white race and the other of black, yellow or brown—tend by some strange fatality to inherit the bad qualities of both races and the good qualities of neither. This is a case to which must be applied the saying, "Give a dog a bad name and hang him." The white man in North America, in India, and in New Zealand desires the increase and prosperity of his own race. Like the fancier set on the production of certain breeds of domesticated animals, he has no toleration for a "mongrel." In so far as it is true that miscegenation (marriage of white and coloured race) produces a stock which rapidly dies out—this is due to the adverse conditions, the opposition and hostility to which the mixed race is exposed by the attitude of the dominant white race. To the same cause is due the development of ignoble and possibly dangerous characteristics in the unfortunate offspring of these marriages more frequently than in those who find their natural place and healthy up-bringing either in the white or the coloured sections of the community. The "half-breed" is in some countries inexorably rejected by the race of his or her white parent and forced to take up an equivocal association with the coloured race.
That some, at any rate, of the evils attributed to "miscegenation" are due to the baneful influence of "pride of race" is evident from the fact that the Portuguese (with the exception of a small aristocratic class) have not since the early days of the fourteenth century, perhaps in consequence of established association with the Moorish and other North African races, shown that pride of race and aversion to mixture with dark-skinned races which is so strong a feature in the Anglo-Saxons, their successors and rivals as colonists. The long-standing admixture of black blood in the Portuguese population before the colonization of South America, has led to a toleration on the part of the Portuguese colonists of "miscegenation," both with Indians and the liberated descendants of imported negro slaves. The consequence is that in Brazil there is no condemnation of black blood; children of mixed parentage and of coloured race attend the same schools as those of European blood, and freely associate with them. There is no notion that that portion of the population which is of mixed negro, Indian, and white blood is less vigorous or fertile than the unmixed, nor that vice and feebleness are the characteristics of the former, whilst virtue and capacity belong to the latter.
The determined hostility of the Anglo-Saxon race in North America and in British India to "miscegenation" is in the case of the United States to be explained by the peculiar relation of a large slave population in the Southern States to a pure white slave-owning race: whilst in India we have a handful of white men temporarily stationed as rulers of millions of "natives," but never accepting India as their home. The attitude of the Anglo-Saxon race to the North American Indians, and also to the Maoris of New Zealand, has never been so extreme in the matter of miscegenation as it has been to negroid people and to the very different though dark-skinned people of the East. In support of that opinion may be cited the fact that some of "the first families of Virginia" are proud of their descent from Pocahontes, the Algonkian "Princess" who married the Englishman Rolfe. In New Zealand there are many families of mixed Anglo-Saxon and Maori blood. Though they are not ostracized, as are the half-breeds of negro blood in the United States, there is a firm tendency to relegate the half-breeds in New Zealand to the Maori section of the population, which it must be remembered includes some of the richest and most prosperous landowners in the colony.
It may be questioned whether there is in this matter a greater "pride of race" among Anglo-Saxons than among other Northern European peoples. Neither the French nor the Germans have established great colonies like the English, nor undertaken the administration of a huge Eastern Empire, and have, therefore, not shown what attitude they would adopt under such circumstances. The tolerance and easy-going humanitarianism of the French in relation to "miscegenation" in their dependencies in past times has never had the significance or practical importance which it would have possessed in the English Colonies and in the great Indian Empire.
There is, on account of the sporadic and exceptional occurrence of modern instances, no information of any value as to the results of mixture of other races of man. In early times and among more primitive or less civilized peoples there appears to have been, when immigration or conquest gave the opportunity, no obstacle to a free intermixture of an incoming race with the natives of an invaded territory. The "pride of race" has, nevertheless, throughout historic time been a frequent factor in the adjustment of populations of diverse races, and though "colour" has been a frequent "test" or symbol of the superior and exclusive race, it has not been the only characteristic exalted to such importance. Such "pride of race" has frequently excluded the members of a closely allied but conquered racial group from intermarriage with the conquerors, and has only disappeared after centuries of persistence. The term "blue blood" is interesting in this connection. It is the "saing d'azure" of the Gothic invaders, the conquerors of the Iberian and Moorish people of Spain. It refers not to any "blueness" of the blood itself, such as distinguishes veinous from arterial blood, but to the blue colour of the veins as seen through the colourless skin of a northern race (the Goths), as compared with the invisibility of the veins when the skin is rendered more or less opaque by a brown pigment, as in the Moors and the swarthy Iberians.
Among the people of Western Europe marriage has assumed more and more a character which is almost unknown in the rest of the world. Whatever the future may be in regard to this matter, there is no doubt possible that the place given to women in Western Europe by the ideals of chivalry and the practice of the northern race (which has so largely displaced the traditions of the Roman Empire) has established a relation of the sexes in which marriage and consequent parentage have ceased to be regarded as a mere regularization of animal desire and appetite. The accepted, but not always consciously recognized, view of marriage in Western Europe is that the union so sanctioned and the families thereby produced should be the result not of the mere physical necessity of irresponsible victims of an impulse common to all animals, but the outcome of the deliberate choice of man and woman attracted to one another by sympathy, understanding and reciprocal admiration, based upon knowledge of character, mental gifts and aspirations, as well as upon bodily charm. A rarely-expressed but none the less deeply-seated conviction exists that from such unions children of the finest nature, nurtured in circumstances most likely to make them worthy members of the community, will be born and reared. It is this conviction which leads to, or at any rate endorses, the exclusiveness which is described as "pride of race." The Anglo-Saxon man and equally the Anglo-Saxon woman (as well as the allied races of neighbouring nationalities) recognize a responsibility, a race duty, resulting from accumulated tradition, the heirloom of long ages of family life, which causes the man to be ashamed of, and the woman to shrink with instinctive horror from, union with an individual of a remote race with whom there can be no real sympathy, no intimate understanding. That seems to me to be the explanation and the justification of the "colour bar."
In relation to the probable effectiveness of sexual selection among uncivilized peoples in favouring and maintaining a particular type or form of features, hair, etc., characteristic of the race, independently of the life-preserving value of such qualities, I may mention, before quitting this difficult but strangely fascinating subject, a fact observed by a traveller in Africa, and related to me by him. Other similar facts are on record. Among the negroes employed as "porters" by my friend, some thirty in number, was one who had a narrow aquiline nose and thin lips. He was as black and as woolly-haired as any of them, but would if of fair complexion have been regarded by Europeans as a very handsome, fine-featured man. Such cases are not uncommon in parts of Africa, where probably an unrecognized mixture with Arab or Hamite blood has occurred. My friend expected this man to be a favourite, on account of what to him appeared to be "good looks," with the girls of the villages at which he camped during a three months' journey. At every such village, as they journeyed on, the travellers were received with joy and good nature. The negro porters were fêted and made much of by the young women. But one alone was unpopular and regarded with ridicule and dislike. This was the handsome negro with the fine, well-modelled nose and beautiful European lips. The black beauties turned their backs on him, in spite of his amiable character and kindly overtures. They invariably and by open confession preferred the men with the thickest lips, the broadest noses, and the most thoroughly (as we should say) degraded prognathous appearance and disgusting expression. Hence no doubt the young negresses were likely to perpetuate in their offspring the features which are characteristic of their race, and hence it is probable that mere capricious sexual selection of individuals most completely conforming to a preferred type—irrespective of the value of the features preferred—may have great effect in both the selection and the maintenance of the peculiarities of the type. Dark skin may thus have been selected, until it became actually black; a slight curling of the hair, until it became woolly; thickish lips and broadish nose, until they became excessive in thickness and breadth.