Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/457

 RACE AND MARRIAGE 443

between aggressive and stationary races that is rarely recognized by law. The half-breeds usually stand outside the accepted circles of both parent races, despising the one, despised by the other, in sympathetic touch with neither. This condition is not always improved when the dominant race deliberately adopts the policy of cross-breeding. The access of the white race to tropical lands, raising as it has the question of acclimatization, has sug- gested the possibility of blending the European and native races in order to secure a physically fit stock capable of perpetuating the essential qualities of the whites^ Because the Spaniards and Portuguese have shown great facility in fusing with the tropical races, they have, to outward appearances, solved the problem of tropical colonization better than the lighter races of the north of Europe. But, as Ripley points out, intermarriage does not really bring about acclimatization at all. It results in the forma- tion of an entirely new type.^^ Undoubtedly crossing with the dark races furnishes, for some regions, the sole means by which the European peoples can survive in the tropics in any form. Furthermore, where aggressive races undertake to govern back- ward peoples of alien stock it may be theoretically advantageous to have a mixed class to break the shock between the two types. Mr. Sydney Olivier is convinced that this is the case in the British West Indies :

I consider that this class of mixed race is a valuable and indispensable part of any West Indian community, and that a colony of blacks, colored, and whites has far more organic efficiency and far more promise in it than a colony of black and white alone. A community of white and black alone will remain, so far as official classes are concerned, a community of employ- ers and serfs, concessionaries and tributaries, with, at best, a bureaucracy to keep the peace between them and attend to the nice adjustment of this burden. The graded mixed class in Jamaica helps to make an organic whole and saves it from this distinctive cleavage.*'

But conditions in Jamaica are peculiar because in that island the hybrids are not, as is usually true, in antagonism with either of

examples of acclimatization have occurred without race crossing.
 * The Races of Europe, 569. Ripley notes that some of the most successful

XI, 6.
 * 01ivier, "The White Man's Burden at Home," International Quarterly,