[65]. This volume contains portraits of ninety-seven contributors to it, whom I have roughly classified according to their features and apparent complexion. There are only three whom one can put down as probably pure negroes. Of the remainder, twenty-three seem to be predominantly negroes, but clearly not pure-bred; thirty-four are typical mulattoes (that is to say, appear to be half black, half white); in thirty-three the features are almost entirely Caucasian, but the complexion is unmistakably swarthy, while in five there is scarcely any recognizable trace of negro blood. The decoration round the portraits in this book is curious and instructive. It consists of a scroll-work encircling two pairs of contrasted medallions. On the one side we have a black slave being flogged, on the other a very light mulatto writing in a study, surrounded with books; on the one side a negro kneeling with broken fetters on his wrists, on the other a frock-coated mulatto on a platform, with an ice-water pitcher on his table, lecturing with gesticulation to a crowded audience.
[66]. “What evil spirit has come upon the present-day Afro-American that a people who, from the days of Homer until this generation, have borne the epithet of ‘blameless Ethiopians’ should now be accused as the scourge of mankind?” Kelly Miller (coloured), “Race Adjustment,” p. 77.
[67]. I do not dwell on his surely unadvised initial statement that the “barriers” between white and black “are not different in kind or in strength from those which once separated neighbouring European tribes.” I presume that “once” must be taken as referring to pre-historic ages, reconstructed on scanty ethnological evidence.
[68]. Yet I cannot but call attention once more to the doubt even on this point. See p. 108. The general manager (a Canadian) of the company which laid down the street-car lines in Kingston, Jamaica, reported that “the best and most reliable of the workmen were the pure blacks. This was found to be invariably the case.”—W. P. Livingstone, “Black Jamaica,” p. 182.
[69]. Several of my critics, when this essay first appeared, misunderstood this phrase. I do not mean that if the legal barriers were removed white men would rush to marry black women. What I mean is that, in a democratic community, the legal barrier could not possibly be removed unless there had previously occurred a relaxation, or rather reversal, of public sentiment with regard to mixed unions.
[70]. I assume that, the principle once accepted, there will be small difficulty in arranging the respective rights and duties in this matter of the central and the State governments. The colour problem is a national concern, if ever there was one.
[71]. The negro State would, of course, send to Congress its two Senators and its due proportion of members of the Lower House.
[72]. “I know of no other community of white people of equal numbers in the world to-day carrying the burden borne by those of the Southern States.... I mean the burden of ... administering the same law for the two most diverse races on earth; of so carrying themselves in the various relations of daily life with these childish people that their conduct may have the approval of their consciences; of living with a due regard for the opinions of their fellow-men, the while oppressed by the consciousness that their fellow-men do not, will not, or cannot understand.”—A. H. Stone, “The American Race Problem,” p. 74.
PART III
HAVANA TO PANAMA