Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/454

438 The second factor in our argument is the impossibility of fusion between whites and blacks. The latter have been, and must continue to be, a distinct and alien race. The fusion of races is the resultant from social equality and intermarriage, and the barrier to this here is insurmountable. The human species presents three grand varieties, marked off by color—white, yellow, and black. One at the first, in origin and color, the race multiplied and spread, and separate sections, settled in different latitudes, took on under climatic conditions acting with abnormal force in that early and impressionable period of the race's age—took on (we say) different hues, which, as the race grew and hardened, crystallized into permanent characteristics. Social affinity exists among the families of these three groups. The groups themselves stand rigidly apart. The Irish, German, French, etc., who come to these shores, readily intermarry among themselves and with the native population. Within a generation or two the sharpness of national feature disappears, and the issue is the American whose mixed blood is the country's foremost hope. It can not be—a fusion like this between whites and blacks. Account for it as we may, the antipathy is a palpable fact which no one fails to recognize—an antipathy not less strong among the Northern than among the Southern whites. However the former may, on the score of matters political, profess themselves special friends to the blacks, the question of intermarriage and social equality, when brought to practical test, they will not touch with the end of the little finger. Whether it be that the blacks, because of their former condition of servitude, are regarded as a permanently degraded class; whether it be that the whites, from their historic eminence, are possessed with a consciousness of superiority which spurns alliance—the fact that fusion is impossible no one in his senses can deny.

These, then, are the factors in our argument, and the source of the inferences to follow: 1. That the black population is gaining on the whites; 2. That the former is, and must continue to be, a distinct and alien people.

Two inferences follow—the first of a social character; the second, political:

1. The status of the black population, as a distinct and alien race, condemns the race to remain, in perpetuum, the laboring class. If its blood can not commingle with that of the whites, social advancement ceases at an early stage; the higher social planes are incapable of attainment; whereby is broken a fundamental social law that allows to the individual full freedom to rise or fall in the social scale, without hindrance from race prejudice or prestige.

That is the healthiest society which is the freest, which gives the fullest play to individual intelligence and energy; and in such a social state we note a tendency on the part of the rich upper class to sink, and the poor laboring class to rise; we observe therein a social cycle