The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn

by William Benjamin Smith

But if the Black man has advanced so remarkably in Southern slavery, may we not expect him to advance still more remarkably, especially now that he is a free man? At first blush, this expectation may seem plausible; but a very little reflection and observation must show its vanity. The first sharp breath of winter lends a keen edge to the appetite; the continued cold does not make it keener and keener. The fagged-out man of business or leader of society retires to some cool and quiet health resort and reacts almost instantly. In a week he gains ten pounds, in two weeks fifteen, in a month twenty; but it would be a great mistake to suppose that this rate of gain could be maintained for any considerable time. The natural effect of the changed and improved conditions is soon exhausted, the limits set in the constitution of the subject are soon reached. So, too, in the domestication of plants and animals. A marvellous superficial alteration may be speedily brought about, but the bound is close at hand and is approached with rapidly decreasing velocity that soon becomes hardly perceptible. By no such means is any steady progress possible.

Precisely so in the domestication, education, civilization of the lower races. These latter do undoubtedly possess undeveloped potentialities; they are capable of better things. The immediate result of subjecting them to new conditions that stimulate their powers may often be highly gratifying. But herein lies no promise whatever of any progressive amelioration. The boundaries are near by; nor can they be overstepped by any such extra-organic agencies. Moreover, it must not be forgotten that, in perhaps every such case, there is some sacrifice—it may be a fatal sacrifice—of the native vigour of the primitive stock.

This reflection is completely confirmed by the actual example of the Negro in a state of freedom. Unless all the statistical indications be grossly misleading, the movement of the Afro-American average in the last generation has been down and not up, backward and not forward. [ [12] ] Especially the physical decline has been measurable and ominous. In Haiti the same experiment has been carried much further, and with results proportionately more disastrous. A hundred years of internecine strife have witnessed nothing but a slow reversion to barbarism. The interest on the public debt remains unpaid, agriculture is most primitive, manufactures languish, the industries for which the island was once famous are dead or dying, the beautiful French language is Africanized into a structureless patois. [ [13] ]

Here, too, is the natural place for one of the most plausible and at the same time most sophistical arguments yet advanced for the essential comparability, if not the perfect equality, of the White and the Black—an argument frequent on the lips of the most conspicuous leader of his people, namely: that the Negro, and only the Negro, has been able to maintain himself against or in presence of the aggressive Anglo-Saxon (we do not pretend to reproduce his words, not having them at hand, but we do not misrepresent his idea). However, the Negro has not maintained himself against, but only with and for, the Anglo-Saxon. A century long the Blacks did greatly flourish, because they were greatly cherished, in the South, despite occasional cruelty, which rarely or never hindered development. Fatuously enough, the Whites fancied it to their own interest to warm up the Blacks into the most vigorous life. The ante-bellum slaves were, perhaps, the best-nurtured labouring population to be found anywhere in the history of mankind. Moreover, their stock was actually strengthened by artificial selection. No wonder, then, that the Black man more than maintained himself under conditions that were racially so extremely favourable. Of course, little credit or none at all goes to the humanity of the slaveholder. The best that could be said would be that he displayed a semi-enlightened selfishness. He considered his slaves

Something better than his dog, a little dearer than his horse.

It is, indeed, a wide-spread paradox of civilization, that the possessors exhibit far deeper wisdom in the treatment of their possessions than in the treatment of themselves. They choose food for their children less rationally than for their cows. A royal weakling was gazing admiringly at a lordly bull, and exclaimed: "What a magnificent specimen he is!" "Yes," replied the bull, "if your ancestors had been selected as carefully as mine, you would be a magnificent specimen, too."

There are yet other considerations, as the linguistic, of much weight, but of subtile or else of delicate nature, into which at present we forbear to enter. However, one further reflection of a very general nature must not be omitted. The diversities of type found even among Europeans, still more among other Caucasians, are remarkable and universally recognized. Norwegian and Italian, Russian and Spaniard, Cretan and Scot, can hardly be confounded, not to contrast Dane and Hindu, Teuton and Arab, Irishman and Jew. These diversities affect not merely or mainly the body, but still more the mind, all its products and institutions. Moreover, they are very persistent, maintaining and asserting themselves in scarcely diminished force from generation to generation, sometimes even under levelling conditions of highly composite intermixture. "We have seen how tenaciously they have clung to the type of their ancestors throughout all the vicissitudes of ages" (Ripley, Pop. Sci. Mon., March, 1898, p. 608).

The thread of national character, though interlaced and interwoven with bewildering perplexity, is found to stretch itself unbroken through the ages. In continuous illustration of this truth we may cite the great work of Lapouge, L'Aryen, and the researches of the school he so brilliantly represents. Furthermore, these differences are not merely sidewise, right and left, this way and that, in the same plane of quality. They are at least three-dimensional; they are up and down, higher and lower. The one race is distinctly superior, the other inferior, in some given particular. While all branches of this great family are very highly endowed, yet they are by no means equally endowed. Each has its points of excellence, but these points are not the same in number or importance. Even among these members of the same family, there is by no means equality; there are favourites of nature. Now even the protagonist of the Black man does not controvert Mr. Darwin, does not deny that the distinction between Negro and European is apparently great enough to mark off two species; it merely says the distinction is not of superior and inferior. But how can this be? Will any one deny that the Greek was measurably superior to the Mede in a host of important particulars? That he has excelled all other sons of men in certain respects? That he has fallen markedly below the Jew and the German in others? If, then, distinctions of inferior and superior do undoubtedly obtain between stems so closely knit physiologically and genetically, with what show of reason can it be held that varieties, like Negro and European, distinct enough for "true and good species," are yet not to be distinguished as inferior and superior? In what respect, pray then, are they distinguishable? Possibly some one may say that black, as a color for man, is neither better nor worse than white—we doubt it, but let it pass; that a broad, flat nose and thick, everted lips are neither inferior nor superior to the straight, clean-cut nose and lips curved like the bow of Phœbus. But even if we do not dispute about such tastes, the list of such regards is a very short one, and when we come to the profounder mental, moral, and social differences, we can find no other terms than greater and less to describe the relative endowments of the widely sundered races. The one breed of dogs does not differ from the other merely in length of hair or shape of head and face; it is superior or inferior in size, strength, courage, agility, endurance, ferocity, fidelity, docility, intelligence. Can we say less, must we not say more, of the varieties of men? We should really like to know, if the Greeks were neither superior nor inferior to the Bushmen, what was the real distinction between them?

Once again, if millennial contact and intermingling of such near affinities as Teuton and Alpine Kelt have not availed to efface their distinguishing features, either of body or of mind—if the wonted ancestral fires still live in the remote descendants—how can we hope for aught else from the mixture of European and African? Will not the slumberous apathy in which the Dark Continent broods away its æons surely fall upon the people that drink its blood into their own veins? Not to anticipate such a result is to scorn analogy, to despise science, to defy history.

We now come to the second question: Will intermingling with inferiors really lower the superior stock? It seems very hard to believe that any sober-minded man can long hesitate to answer, Yes. Does any breeder of horses or cattle or dogs or pigeons, or any cultivator of grains or flowers, or any student of heredity in either plants or animals, entertain any doubt whatever? We trow not. We need not, however, appeal to general principles, or to common sense, or to universal observation of the lower planes of life. The mingling of races is no new thing on our planet; it has been widely diffused, and the results are matters of record. We shall content ourselves with citing a single authority, than whom there is none higher—whom not even the most suspicious will suspect of Southern ignorance and prejudice. We allude to the distinguished author of "The American Commonwealth," and the "Assimilation of Races in the United States."