The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn

by William Benjamin Smith

It is not all in training up

A child against its will:

To silver scour a pewter cup,—

It will be pewter still.

No, a thousand times no! Environment is not all nor nearly all—nay, not nearly half. Says Lombroso: "The action of climate and circumstance is very slight by the side of heredity" (op. cit., p. 88). Saith Heraclitus, "Much learning does not teach to have mind"; saith Pindar, "His art is true who by nature hath knowledge," and he scorns the crows that have but learned. Let the outer impact be what it will, it is the "inherent" qualities that determine the response. Sing out the natural C; among a score of tuning-forks only one will reply. Nay more; different constitutions may make exactly opposite replies: "the roar of the lion scatters the sheep, but gathers the jackals"; the prayer of Clarence but hardens the heart of the first murderer, though it softens the soul of the second. All this, one would think, a child might understand. Nature blazons it on every leaf and every star, and proclaims it with a million tongues; but overhumane doctrinaires will neither see nor hear anything that impugns their sacrosanct dogma, that "all men are created equal". "The trend of authoritative opinion" insists on "minimizing the degree of difference of mental capacity" and regarding the mental gap as more apparent than real and due rather to experience and training than to innate factors—whereat the current philanthropy claps its hands and cries, "Eureka! Come, now! Let us train and experience the Negro and close up the mental gap in a jiffy"! But will some manufacturer or wholesale importer of "authoritative opinions" kindly inform us what "mental gap" has ever been closed up by "experience and training"?

Great, indeed, is the potence of "environment"; greater, by far, the potence of heredity. Fortunately we are not left quite in the dark as to their relative importance. In discussing "race suicide" an eminent scholar, who is always sage and sagacious, save only when celeri saucius Africo, declares: "That those who are intellectually the best in each generation should leave the fewest descendants is a serious thing; for all the recent work in anthropology teaches the importance of heredity, and tends to prove Galton's theory that genius is inherited." From a study of the one thousand most eminent men of history, but for whom "the world would have made little progress in learning, invention or wealth," Processor Cattell concludes that "heredity, including in that term both stability and variability of stock, is more potent than social tradition or physical environment." From a study of European royal genealogies, it is deduced by Dr. F. A. Woods, of Harvard, that "heredity has exercised in mental life a factor not far from nine-tenths, while from the moral side something over one-half."

Without placing implicit faith in such numerical estimates, and without pausing to inquire how one might best "exercise a factor", the reader will note the admitted dominance of heredity over all other forces. It will be observed that the deductions of Dr. Woods refer to the "mental life" and the "moral side" in general, and not merely to extraordinary manifestations or "genius," as in "Galton's theory". Surely there is little enough of the latter to be found in "all the royal families of Europe", and quite sufficient of something else. Besides, it seems clear that if genius be inherited, if marked deviations from the average in this direction or in that be transmitted, then a fortiori must also the general average character be itself in detail determined by inheritance. For every example of "inherited genius" there lie close at hand, under common and immediate observation, a thousand examples of inheritance of qualities physical, mental, and moral that fall within the bounds of the normal. Such qualities have beneath them a far solider substructure of age, a far more settled and less mutable organic habit of centuries, than do the new growths, the spontaneous mutations, that we call genius, or any marked eccentricity. If, then, the latter be inherited, far more so the former. And such is precisely the foundation on which the whole fabric of the foregoing argument has been reared.

Let the reader observe that the question, the only real question, regards the "mental gap" between the Negro and the Caucasian, for which we dare not substitute "between savage and civilized man". This matter is entirely another and entirely irrelevant. The "difference of mental capacity" between the savage Greek and the civilized Egyptian was indeed great, but was in favour of the savage youth and against the civilized ancient. So, too, the savage Teuton fully equalled or excelled in mental capacity his civilized Italian foeman. The defects of these savages were cultural, not mental proper, and culture was enough speedily to supply them. But where, we ask again, have real "mental gaps" been filled up by culture? Where have racial characteristics been transformed or abolished? Have equal opportunities raised the 150,000 Negroes in Pennsylvania to the white level? Or the 100,000 in New York? Or those in New England? Or in Chatham, Ontario? Or in Paris? When Greek culture led captive the Roman captor, did it arm him with Greek genius? Did it close up the "mental gap"? When the bow of Hellenic science fell into the hands of the Arab, was he quite able to bend it?

We recall our anthropologic and ethnologic disputants to the ridge of war, and ask, Do they really believe that the difference between the Niger and the Euphrates was one of "experience and training"? If so, pray tell us how many more years had the Sumerians lived seventy centuries ago than the citizens of Dahomey up to now? Did the former enjoy, like the latter, a contact for centuries with American missionaries and European civilization? And whence came the "experience and training" of Hammurabi and Sin-mubalit and their ancestors? Who trained their trainers? If indeed "it is a question of mental contents rather than of mental capacities," whence, we insist, came those "mental contents"? Did they fall out of the sky into the empty skulls of Nineveh? Why, then, did this meteoric shower powder Mesopotamia so densely and sprinkle a dust so impalpable over the Sudan? "Mental contents rather than mental capacities"? True, the word "capacities" is unluckily chosen; "faculties" would have been better, but, even as it stands, there was never a more manifest inversion of the truth. We have taught for a score of years and every year we see more clearly that the teacher is helpful mainly to the favoured few that do not need him. We appeal to the whole tribe of teachers, from Dan to Beersheba—what one has ever supplied "mental contents" in the absence of "mental capacities"? This is preëminently the age of education. Its agencies are all-embracing and bewildering in their complexity and universality. Everything is taught and everything is studied in the most thoroughgoing fashion, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall. If it be merely or mainly a question of "experience and training" and "mental contents," surely we have distanced our ancestors immensely;—we are altogether "out of sight". Genius should run riot on our streets. Homers, Platos and Euclids, Cæsars, Shakesperes and Newtons, Goethes and Kants, Pascals, Dantes and Titians, should be as plenty as blackberries. And yet such is not very notably the case. There is still some room at the top. The supply of abilities of the very highest order is nowhere markedly in excess of the demand.

Will anyone contend that "experience and training" and subcranial injection of "mental contents" have ever been able to close up the "mental gap" between individuals of the same race, or even of the same family? Why, then, imagine that they may close up the far wider gap between individuals of different races—between the races themselves? This doctrine of the all-sufficiency of "experience and training" and "mental contents" assumes, in fact, the proportions of an overgrown ironical joke and would grace the vacuous columns of Judge far better than the sober-minded pages of Anthropology. As a child we have sometimes wondered why the eagle should so far outfly the turkey-gobbler; it seems the mystery is now clearly resolved—the eagle has doubtless had more "experience and training".