Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/463

 RACE AND MARRIAGE 449

antipathies, aversion to intermarriage with supposedly lower ethnic types is based on mental processes which lie deeper than mere names. It is the expression of a normal ethnic instinct of self-preservation. Cross-breeding is something more than a union of the individual lives of the parties. It generally involves a change of the culture status for the present and succeeding generations. It means a modification of the self-conscious ethnic personality which, whether good or bad, efficient or inefficient, is at least a settled reality that would be lost by blending with an alien type. In the contact of culture systems there always sur- vives something of the struggle of primitive groups which were hostile because strange to one another. Or, as Mr. Bryce puts it, race enmity is perhaps "a survival from the times when each race could maintain itself only by slaughtering its enemies."^^ What appears to be merely unreasoning hatred of external fea- tures like skin color and hair structure may in the last analysis be a subconscious choice which rejects what is associated in thought with undesirable cultural standards.

Nevertheless, indiscriminate use of the terms "higher" and "lower" races is misleading and dangerous. The sum of actual achievement up to any given time may not be an accurate index of racial capacity. Certain groups may by spurting have devel- oped a high degree of civilization and have exhausted themselves in the process, while less promising groups, moving slowly but persistently, may in time work out equally great results. The danger of physical exhaustion through overdevelopment of the intellect necessitates constant additions of grosser elements from more sturdy stocks, and this is after all the best plea in the case for race mixture in modern times. But if physical amelioration be purchased at the expense of any fundamental elements of civili- zation the balance of advantage will be destroyed. Mr. Bryce's summing up of the argument against indiscriminate surrender of race purity is most masterly :

Now for the future of mankind nothing is more vital than that some races should be maintained at the highest level of efficiency, because the work they can do for thought and art and letters, for scientific discovery

"Impressions of South Africa, 365, 367.