There remain yet certain important political and economical and even juridical aspects of the subject, concerning which the writer has not neglected to gather relevant material of evidence; but any adequate discussion would carry the reader too far afield and would mar the unity of the work as it now stands. Accordingly these aspects are left unregarded.
The writer fancies one may forecast the only reply likely to be brought forward under even a thin guise of plausibility. It will be said, as it is said, that the much-dreaded contamination of blood is the merest bugaboo. But nay! it is a tremendous and instant peril, against which eternal vigilance is the only safeguard, in whose presence it is vain and fatuous to cry "peace, peace" when there is no peace, a peril whose menace is sharpened by well-meant efforts at humanity and generosity, by seemingly just demands for social equality masquerading as "equal opportunity." The one adequate definition of this "equal opportunity" has been bravely given by that most able and eloquent Negroid, Prof. William H. Councill: "Will the White man permit the Negro to have an equal part in the industrial, political, social and civil advantages of the United States? This, as I understand it, is the problem." All this is quite beyond question to the mind that cherishes no illusions and insistently beholds things as they are. Neither is it less sure that even the Southern conscience needs quickening at this vital point. The writer has been appalled at the cool indifference with which amalgamation is contemplated as necessary and inevitable by certain highly intelligent philanthropists in the Southland. The matter is delicate and difficult to argue, and in the body of the book it has perhaps been stressed too lightly; but the danger signals are clearly discernible, even as they were to Prof. E. D. Cope, and it is madness not to heed them. If the race barrier be removed, and the individual standard of personal excellence be established, the twilight of this century will gather upon a nation hopelessly sinking in the mire of Mongrelism.
It can hardly be hoped that any reader will be satisfied with the glimpse here disclosed of the future. Certainly not the Negro, nor his apologists; nor even such as sympathize most fully with the writer. The solemn secular processes, to which the solution of the problem is relegated, are so very leisurely in their working, closing down upon their final result with the deliberation of a glacier, or like some slowly convergent infinite series. But Nature is once for all thus leaden-footed, and it is extremely difficult to quicken her pace.
We have bestowed merely a glance upon the scheme of Deportation, which is alas! not now a question of practical statesmanship, though it may indeed become one sooner than we think.
However, the outlook is not hopeless to him who has a sense of the world to come, who lives in his race, who feels the solidarity of its present with its future as well as with its past. "Of men that are just, the true saviour is Time." Besides, it seems not at all strange that a disease, chronic through centuries, should require centuries for its cure, that the multiplied echoes of the curse of African slavery should go sounding on, even to the years of many generations.
W. B. S.
Tulane University,
25th October, 1904.
THE COLOR LINE