Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/129

Rh should ever have before it all that is refining and beautiful in the world, all that tends to elevate body and mind; all that inspires to cultivate art, science, literature and learning, and certainly not be brought into the atmosphere of another people who have all the worse factors of degradation and ignorance in their organization. People may think that the latter may have no detrimental influence upon the higher race, but it does nevertheless, and most powerfully so. Anything and everything in the environment of any animal is morally certain to affect that animal in one way or another. The same axiom applies with equal truth to the race or the group. With respect to the superior people, their morals and ethics are bound to suffer. A dozen rotten apples have it in their power to spoil the entire barrel, and the greater the number of the rotten ones the sooner will general decay and corruption take place. It is all nonsense to talk about the better race redeeming and eventually elevating the lower one to the plane of the former, for nature's laws work in no such manner. In this country, the highest civilization, the cleanest and soundest white people flourish where the negro is not, or exists in comparatively, few numbers. But to carry this argument further would be but to introduce odious comparisons, and that is something I certainly desire to avoid. Washington, our nation's capital, has in these particulars a terrible load to carry, and the amount of black venom that has been injected into her veins requires all the force of her Caucasian constitution to tolerate, and as beautiful as that growing city is, it nevertheless could be far more so were it not for the presence, in its every place and thoroughfare, of the low African stock

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