Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/483

Rh ourselves. As a matter of fact, the race struggle covers the whole world, wherever whites and blacks are brought together under common political and social forms. It is the struggle of a highly differentiated, efficient civilization with one more simple and primitive. This struggle results from the differing powers of adaptation of the two races, Racial characteristics are the accompaniments rather than the cause of lack of adjustment.

Since the elements of the problem are simple and fundamental and since they are everywhere essentially the same, it is to be expected that the color struggle should follow similar lines in various parts of the world. The antipathy between the whites and Indians in America from the earliest period of colonization to the present, the very terms in which this antipathy was expressed and the methods of conflict on each side, have been duplicated in the struggle between the English colonists and the natives of Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. And at the present moment the political and social elements of the race problem in the southern States of America are almost identical with those in the South African colonies.

It has been the misfortune of white civilization in its contact with the colored races in America, Africa and Australasia that both its worst products and its least desirable representatives were the ones first in the field. This has been an important factor in shaping the early relations of the races. It is the rover, the outlaw and the irresponsible trader who come first, and it is too often the contraband goods of civilization that they carry. It has been the rougher type of white also who has intermarried with native women and become the father of a hybrid progeny. Curiously enough, it is among this rougher class of whites that the worst type of race animosity exists. Where the cultural rank has been more nearly equal and where the contact has been of the organized rather than sporadic type, the mingling of the races has generally been accompanied by little confusion or social disintegration.

It goes without saying that there is a varying degree of adaptability and fusing power among the different branches of the white race in their relations with backward peoples. The Latin peoples in Europe have shown peculiar capacity for successful inter-marriage with tropic races. Spaniards have crossed with fair success with both Indians and negroes in America and with Malays in the Philippines, as have the Portuguese with the two former types in Brazil. Undoubtedly the Catholic Latin peoples have shown peculiar capacity for merging with colored peoples and manifest less color prejudice than do the Protestant Teutons. This is due, no doubt, in part to physical facts, but a more important factor is the insistence of the Roman Catholic Church on the solidarity of the world's peoples and its deprecation of race prejudice. In the Spanish and French West Indies there is a greater proportion of mixed marriages