Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 79.djvu/486

482 negro feels an instinctive admiration for southern white people, in preference to unemotional northerners, so the race has in the course of generations reacted more spontaneously, and perhaps more wholesomely, to the vivacious Latin temperament than to the sterner Teuton type. The smaller degree of race friction in the Latin colonies may point to a possible modification of world policy in the white man's growing problem of dealing with black races in Africa and Australasia.

This tendency of the negro to take on the psychic tone of the dominant culture may have far-reaching results in Africa itself. Weale is convinced that if the African negro shall be Mohammedanized the fate of the white man's empire in that continent will be sealed. From the Arabs the negro would acquire an aggressive, war-like spirit that would ultimately lead to his mastery of his own continent. If, on the other hand, the Africans are christianized they will remain docile. But, as already noted, the negro temperament is little adapted to aggressiveness or independent activity. It is therefore more probable that he will develop in civilization, if he develops at all, on the lines of the European peoples who are pressing on the more remote portions of Africa with ever-increasing persistence.

Wherever the blacks are massed in undisturbed possession of the soil, their contact with the whites is in the nature of independent group antagonism. In tropical Africa the true negro is at home, and, so far as can now be foreseen, the white man can rule only as an outsider without constituting any appreciable element in the social population. But on the fringes of the continent the situation is very similar to that in the United States, where a ruling race is settled upon the same soil and is capable of self-perpetuation. But even in temperate South Africa it is possible that large political units, wholly black, may survive. The South African black, except in Cape Colony, is not at present granted equal political rights, but if he continues to progress in intelligence as he has recently done his demand for political and social equality must become exceedingly strong, as it has in the United States; and the struggle for equality will of itself be a means of developing a fixed sense of race separateness which must long make the color question a sore spot in South African politics.

In the Australian commonwealth the color problem exhibits a most peculiar and interesting phase. The aboriginal inhabitants scarcely figure in the question at all. There can, for the present, be little idea of their active participation in organized social interests, both by reason of their small numbers and because of their absolute lack of capacity. It