We sometimes see it attempted to strengthen the plea for the essential equality of the Negro by reference to the Japanese, who are declared not inferior, though "they would have been called an inferior, a hopelessly submerged race, half a century ago. But they have made a sudden change. This has been no slow Darwinian development, but a per saltum evolution of a new intellectual type—if we may not rather call it a spring blossoming out of ages of winter. There is now every appearance that a similar efflorescence is coming with the negro race—only they have begun with utter ignorance and slavery, and have more to learn, and find less encouragement". Now, in this notion of "efflorescence" there is an element of truth. There are bloom-periods in the life of the race, as of trees and of men. We speak of the Periclean, the Augustan, the Elizabethan age. "For greater dooms do greater doles obtain," [ [19] ] was said in the ancient mystery. "Spirits are not finely touch'd but to fine issues". Extraordinary junctures and crises in the life of the individual and of the race may rouse slumbering powers into vehement activity. But that such admitted facts will bear the weight of inference thrown upon them, we must stoutly deny. The thorn and the thistle may indeed bloom and fructify, but they will not bear grapes or figs. They will bring forth fruit after their kind. Greeks were Greeks before Marathon or Salamis, before even Homer or Agamemnon. Witness the outburst of Arabic genius after Mohammed! Yet Bagdad and Granada could never become like unto Athens or Alexandria. But why multiply illustrations? Efflorescence is one thing, transmutation is another. "We seem to see such a paroxysmal impulse now taking possession of the negro race in this country"! We gravely doubt this "sudden start upward"; we strongly suspect things are not what they seem. We label all such statements "important, if true". [ [20] ]
The illustration from the Orient will not serve its purpose. We by no means admit that Japan does yet "take a front rank among the strong and intellectual nations of the world". One swallow does not make it spring. We are used to parallels between Sophocles and Ibsen. A Harvard junior declared Demosthenes to be the Edward Everett of Greece. But in any case it is not true that "they have made a sudden change". It was only gross ignorance that would have called them "hopelessly submerged half a century ago". They were then, even as they are now and as they were hundreds of years before, an artistic, ingenious, enterprising people, with a well-developed culture—language, literature, religion, social and civic and military life. [ [21] ] Contact with Western civilization has indeed aroused them and spurred their ambition, and turned their ancient powers into modern channels; but we can by no means say it has really augmented those powers or begotten any new ones. It is far from clear that this contact will prove ultimately beneficial. The Oriental grain is not improved to every eye by a cheap veneering of Occidental science and commercialism. We have read of a boy who was gilded from head to foot, to represent an angel at a church festival. The experiment was eminently successful: it turned him not only into an apparent angel, but also into a real one. A similar result may be anticipated as the ultimate issue of all attempts, however well-meant, to engraft alien civilization upon the really backward races of mankind. They will finally be civilized off the face of the earth, or at least from all regions habitable and healthful for the civilizing race.
It seems to be of interest, however, and the dictate of fairness, to recall that, according to a very high and recent, though perhaps not infallible, authority (Professor Ripley), the roots of the great European race-tree are two: [ [22] ] the broad-headed Kelt from Asia and the long-headed Teuton from Africa. If so, then this latter stock, though now the fairest among the sons of men,
Then, sad relief, from the bleak shore that hears
The German Ocean roar, deep blooming, strong,
And yellow-haired the blue-eyed Saxon came—
was once the very darkest! What combined agencies, as of climate and selection, have wrought out this marvellous depigmentation, we need not here inquire. Suffice it that, on the one hand, this fact, if it be a fact,—non nobis est componere tantas lites—would seem to ground the bare possibility that even now such combined agencies might in the same lapse of time bring about a similar transfiguration of the West African. And this we readily grant—if the physiologic nature of the Negro be as plastic now as it was a hundred thousand years ago—which we cannot disprove, but which we have no right to assume. Be this as it may, we have never denied this or any other abstract possibility of negritic evolution. We merely maintain that probability is the guide of life, and that there is no appreciable probability of any such evolution.
On the other hand, if the bright-haired children of the snow and foam be really sprung from such sable prognathous ancestors, then their divergence from the ancestral type most certainly began untold millenniums ago, and the present organic departure from that type is measured, as it were, by the measureless chasm of years that divides them from their African forebears. Now, if nature and the tide of time have spent such centuries of centuries in chiseling out this chasm, how infinitely preposterous to suppose that man can close it up in a generation with the filmy webs of common culture and social equality and civil rights and partisan legislation and caricatured religion and the political spoils of the country post-office! As well expect to rise from the floor to the roof without ever traversing the intervening space.
CHAPTER FOUR