Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/585

Rh with mulatto would be a very real incentive to serious efforts for development on the part of the negro. The logical conclusion may follow in the course of the ages. At any rate from present indications our hope lies in the mulatto. A wise statesmanship and rational patriotism will make every effort to conserve him, and imbue him with his mission in the interests of the brotherhood of a better man. The problem seems possible of solution only as the mulatto will undertake it, with the earnest help of the white.

But Le Bon tells us the cross-breed has no "soul." Surely a soulless race would be a world calamity! But these words are poetical, not scientific. A mulatto has no more lost his soul in being hybrid or a descendant thereof than I should if I were to take up my abode in Fiji. This would surely hurt. But I should be no less a man for all my mental pain. The experience might conceivably work to the expansion of my soul. The mulatto is as loyal to his country, his friends and his conscience, according to his lights, as a "white" man. He is just as sensitive. He feels as deeply, experiences the same thrills of happiness as other rational human beings. He has a soul in as true a sense as the word is used by Le Bon as any man. He has more truly a soul in this sense than the "thoroughbred" professor who has lost his childhood's religious faith. Olivier says on this point:

Whereas the pure race in its prime knows one man only, itself, and one God, its own will, the hybrid is incapable of this exclusive racial pride, and inevitably becomes aware that there is something, the something that we call human, which is greater than the one race or the other, and something in the nature of spiritual power, that is stronger than national God or will. What were, to each separate race, final forms of truth, become, when competing in the focus of our human consciousness, mutually destructive, and each recognizably insufficient. Yet the hybrid finds himself still very much alive, and not at all extinguished with the collapse of his racial theories (p. 25, italics my own).

The truth is that the hybrid finds himself alive and human, with all that this signifies in terms of capacity for soul development. The pure-bred has no better initial equipment. In the matter of human fundamentals they come to differ only as a different nurture plays upon a very similar human nature. There surely are no real data for the support of Le Bon's notion that contrary heredities sap the vitality of hybrids and leave them barren of soul.

The last point is equally difficult, but, like the preceding two, not forbidding. It may be briefly more or less summarily disposed of. The negro can not afford to surrender aught granted him under the constitution. It would be harmful to both colored and whites at this stage of progress to have such alteration achieved as would give the governing powers the free hand exercised by the English in their treatment of the negro of Jamaica. A comparison of conditions as between