Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/399

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In this discussion I would like to substitute "heredity" for "race" and let the quotation read:

When in a Battle Creek restaurant I saw the sign "Colored Patronage not Desired," my sympathy for the Negro enabled me to feel something as he feels, and I can assure you that the depressing force of a public opinion that approves of such discrimination is more influential on the race expression than a very large variation in the germ plasm. W. E. B. DuBois has described this form from the inside in his "Souls of Black Folk" where he says:

When we remember that more than ten per cent, of the population of the United States belong to this class, we can feel that human progress can not proceed without limit until we have modified our race mores. The sad thing about it is the popular view that the race question is to be explained on biological grounds, and that any race except that to which we have been born is on a lower stage of evolution. We condemn them without trial. Wherever there is white contact with Indians the whole attitude is permeated with the idea that there is no good Indian but a dead one, and their efforts to change their conditions always comes face to face with this prejudice. Much of our immigrant problem is of the same sort. We condemn them in toto, as the brigands of Calabria were condemned in the quotation given. Lord Byron expressed the force of other men's opinion when he said:

We can not escape the great and unjustified discouragement that will come to those we suspect do not belong to the race-horse type. The door of hope is closed to them, while the race horses can not fail to get