The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn

by William Benjamin Smith

Or is visions about?

Is our civilization a failure?

Or is the Caucasian played out?

But on recovery from the shock, the shining pageant of all the ages begins to file interminably before the imagination. The triumphs of the Indo-European and Semitic races, the stories of Babylon and Nineveh, of Thebes and Memphis, of Rome and Athens and Jerusalem, of Delhi and of Bagdad, of the Pyramids and of the Parthenon—the radiant names of Hammurabi and Zarathustra and Moses and the Buddha and Mohammed, of Homer and Plato and Phidias and Socrates and Pindar and Pythagoras, and the mightiest Julius, and the imperial philosophers, and their peers without number, the endless creations of art and science and religion and law and literature and every other form of activity, the full-voiced choir of all the Muses, the majestic morality, the hundred-handed philosophy, the manifold wisdom of civilization—all of this infinite cloud of witnesses gather swarming upon us from the whole firmanent of the past and proclaim with pentecostal tongue the glory and supremacy of Caucasian man. It seems impossible to represent in human speech, or by any symbols intelligible to the human mind, the variety and immensity of this consentient testimony of all historic time and place. Not to be overwhelmed and overawed, much more convinced, by such a prodigious spectacle of evidence, is to gaze at midnoon into the heavens and cry out, "Where is the sun?" For over against all these transcendent achievements, what has the West African to set? What art? What science? What religion? What morality? What philosophy? What history? What even one single aspect of civilization or culture or higher humanity? It would seem to be an insult to the reader's intelligence, if we should prolong the comparison.

Now can all this be accidental? Has it just happened that, in all quarters of the world and under all climatic and topographic conditions, East and West, North and South, beneath the tropics and within the frozen circles, by the sea and amid the mountains, in snow, in sand, in forest—that everywhere and everywhen the Caucasian has manifested the same all-conquering, overmastering qualities—not always good or kind or just, but always strong, always striving, always victorious? And that never, and nowhere, and under no circumstances, has the Black man displayed any such capacities as could bring him for a moment into consideration as the White man's equal? We answer, there can be no possibility of mistake. The achievement of the race, its total history both in time and in space, is the best possible index to its powers and potencies. Against this witness of history, even if other indications did plead, they would plead in vain. Even were the brain of the Negro as large as an elephant's, it would matter not. Says Hegel, "Nations are what their deeds are;" and with greater justice we may affirm that the race is what its life is and has been.

It is noteworthy that while the one knight-errant boldly declares that, "Nature knows no forward or backward races," the other more cautiously avoids the term "backward" and denies only inferiority for the Negro. Perhaps one might admit that he is backward and demand for him time and opportunity. However, the distinction is not really pertinent to the issue. As well say the monkey is not inferior, but only backward. It is only a difference of degree—a very great difference, to be sure, but it is idle to say, "Give the Negro time." He has already had time, as much time as the Europeans—thousands and ten thousands of years. And what opportunity has failed him? The power that uplifted Aryan and Semite did not come from without, but from within. No mortal civilized him; he civilized himself. It was the wing of his own spirit that bore him aloft. If the African has equal native might of mind, why has he not wrought out his own civilization and peopled his continent with the monuments of his genius? Or if the material was all there, ready to be ignited, needing only the incensive spark, why has it never, in hundreds of years, caught fire from the blazing torch of Europe? Why has century-long contact with other civilizations never enkindled the feeblest flame? For it is well known that intercourse with foreigners has in no degree elevated or improved the West African, but on the contrary has proved his curse and his doom. (See Ratzel, The History of Mankind, III., pp. 99-100, 102-103, 120, 134.) Moreover, it seems doubtful whether nearly forty [ [5] ] years of persistent and consecrated efforts at education, with the expenditure of hundreds of millions, have revealed yet in ten millions of Afro-Americans a single example of originative ability of notably high order. (Bright Mulattoes, like familiar instances, count little in this argument. It is well known (Mendel's Law) that offspring [ [6] ] do not exactly divide the qualities of parents, but often veer in this respect or in that far over to one side or to the other. Besides, the abilities of such men are apt to loom up unduly large in the popular imagination. We all wonder at a dancing bear, not because he dances well, but because he dances at all.)

Perhaps one of the most unerring indications of the native capacities and tendencies of a race is to be found in its ethnic religion, its mythology, its childlike, untutored attitude towards the riddles of the universe. For there can be but little or no question of outside influence or unequal opportunity. The sun, the moon, the stars, the firmament, the ocean, the plains, the mountains, the forests, the rivers, the seasons, eclipses and precessions, day and night, morning and evening, fire and frost, ice and vapour, wind and cloud, thunder and lightning, life and death, health and disease, dreams and shadows—all these multiform materials of construction have offered themselves in practically equivalent quantity and quality to the phantasy of every race and every age. The reactions have varied widely, and have boldly characterized the genius of each people. Tell me of their gods, and I will tell you of the worshippers. Tried by this standard, the case seems decided, even before it reaches the threshold of the court. For, putting aside the sublime and awful monotheism of the Hebrew, can any one for an instant set in line the august and imposing, if overgrown and superluxuriant, mythology of India, the stern and severe and tremendous religions of the Nile and the Euphrates, the sad and solemn but high-hearted and deep-thoughted musings of Scandinavia and Teuton-land, the infinitely varied and infinitely beautiful mythopœia of Hellas, or even the colorless but sharp-lined abstractions of Italy, with the degraded fetichism, the stock-and stone-service of the Niger and the Congo?

What we may call the historical argument, just presented, finds strong and decisive confirmation, even though it needs none, in the craniology, the physiognomy, and the general anatomy of the Negro. [ [7] ] Take him at his very best—does any one believe that the Olympian Zeus, an Apollo Belvedere, a Melian Venus, a Capitoline Juno, a Hermes of Praxiteles, or a Sistine Madonna could ever by any possibility have emerged from the most fertile fancy of an "Old Master" of the Congo? Perfect his type as you will, even as you perfect the type of a flower or a bird, does not the Sudanese remain at immense remove from the European? Of course, it is always possible to contend that beauty is only subjective, any way, that the hair and brow and nose and lips and jaw and ear of the West African would be just as beautiful as those of the Greek or Anglo-American, if we only thought so. But being what we are, we cannot think so now and still less the further we advance in organic development. Moreover, with equal reason we might say that the tiger-lily was as beautiful as the rose, the hippopotamus as pretty as the squirrel; nay more, we might abolish all distinctions of quality, and identify each pair of contradictories.

Does some one say that physical beauty is a poor, inferior thing at best—that beauty of soul is alone sufficient and only desirable? We deny it outright. Beauty of form and colour has its own high and inalienable and indefectible rights, its own profound significance for the history alike of nature and of man. Even if the intermingling of bloods wrought no other wrong than the degradation of bodily beauty, the coarsening of feature and blurring of coloration, it would still be an unspeakable outrage, to be deprecated and prevented by all means in our power. Moreover, we hold that every such degeneration of facial type will drag along with it inevitably a corresponding declension of spirit. Criminology is confident in its claim of some deep-seated, however obscure, relation between aberrations from the physical and from the mental norm. Though there may be many illustrious exceptions, which our defective knowledge cannot explain, yet the broad general principle may still be maintained:

For of the soule the bodie forme doth take;