Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/149

Rh sition than this? It far transcends the pale of ordinary stupidity! In the United States, taking figures at the lowest estimate, there are now at least 200,000 negro girls and women who are licentious to the last degree and absolutely lacking in every moral sense. These are being continually recruited by the regular negro birth rate. It would require fully 10,000 "white women of the North" to take hold of this matter at all with any hope for success, and pray where are they to come from? Where are they to go to and commence? And what would it all avail? Absolutely nothing, and to discuss any such scheme merely means a dead loss of time, money, paper and ink, in this place, and the negro is altogether too well-known to me in this country for me to further entertain such an asinine suggestion in the present connection.

It is a marvel to me that such a writer and such a keen and thoughtful observer as the author of The American Negro must be, could be so illogical in other directions, and especially one who says and who knows that "The extent of the crime instinct in the negro is indeterminate for the reason that accurate data are unattainable. In so far as he has been held to an outward observance of moral restraints, it is obvious that fear of bodily harm has been the chief influence which has kept him in check. That his nature is surcharged with latent ferocity is shown by abundant evidence of atrociousness, committed on weak and defenceless objects. Indeed, there is good ground for believing that, were the negro once convincingly assured of personal security, all the malignity of his slumbering savagery would immediately find expression in the most revolting acts of physical lawlessness.