Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/96

82 interbreeding, and every child that was born was born with every cell in its body occupying its position according to the immutable laws of heredity and variation. Hence the features and entire organization of each and all of those children responded to the aforesaid laws, just as they do in the case of any other animal, and each came to be the very kind of being, in all particulars, that the operation of those laws would produce, no other organisation in any particular instance being possible. The same may be said for the innate mental and moral potentiality of any particular child. Of course, during the development and growth of any being from the moment of birth onwards to the close of its career, it fhay, to some extent, in a certain proportion of cases, and more or less in others, from a variety of causes, be subject to being molded and changed both mentally, morally and physically. In other words, when a child is born to a pure negro mother by a white man of fine birth and qualities, that child is, according to certain fixed laws, prenatally stamped with certain morphological, psychological, mental and moral characters, no particle of which could possibly have been different under the particular parental combination, however that child may come to be molded afterwards, either for good or for bad. The knowledge we have of inherited prenatal impressions of all kinds that children receive is extremely meagre and wonderfully hazy in its character. No one today can tell why a child resembles one parent more than another, or perhaps a grandparent more than either; or how it grows to become more or less like some member of the family, or perhaps some of its ancestors. Yet all such things