Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/484

480 than in the British West Indies and there are fewer evidences of social friction.

While the antipathy of white toward black is the most pronounced phase of color conflict, prejudice against the blacks is not confined to Europeans and Americans. The Chinese, the most cosmopolitan of peoples, sometimes exhibit a striking aversion to taking black wives or concubines, but manifest no particular aversion to the native women of Java or Borneo. East Indian laborers imported into the British West Indies and British Guiana have generally refused all intercourse with negro women. The American Indians have sometimes interbred with blacks, but in British Guiana they are reported to despise the negroes and to have little intercourse with them.

It is sometimes asserted that a rigid enforcement of the color line in the tropics would leave the two races isolated in an intractable antipathy. Sir Sidney Olivier, governor of Jamaica, has argued from this that a middle class of mixed stock serves as a useful buffer between white and black. He says:

But such interbreeding, Sir Sidney maintains, should invariably come about by the marriage of white men with colored women. There is a good biological reason for this, but the primary consideration is the racial welfare of the whites. Whatever the good qualities of the negro, and Sir Sidney sees more of them than most of his fellow whites, he nevertheless thinks that

A mixed stock, however, while it may lessen the actual clash between the two extreme types in a community, does not necessarily diminish the totality of race antagonism, and may augment it. For the hybrid, instead