Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/25

 to-day a negro strain in many of the whites of Cuba, and a still stronger one in the whites of Brazil. The aversion to colour reaches its maximum among the Teutons. The English in North America and the West Indies did, indeed, during the days of slavery, become the parents of a tolerably large mixed population, as did the Dutch in South Africa. But they scarcely ever intermarried with free coloured people: and when slavery came to an end, illicit unions practically ceased in all these countries. One is assured in the Southern States of America that hardly any children are now born from a white father and a coloured mother. (So the English in India have felt a like aversion to marriages with native women, and even such illicit connexions as were not rare a century ago are now seldom found.

Where a white race comes into contact with a so-called 'red' or 'yellow' race—I use these terms as convenient though not exact—the sense of repulsion is much less pronounced. The English settlers intermarry, though less frequently than the French did, with the aborigines of America. I have been struck by hearing men in the Rocky Mountains, who would have concealed any infusion of negro blood, mention that their mothers or grandmothers had been Indians. The Spaniards have been still less fastidious. All over Central and South America they have become commingled with the aborigines, especially, as was natural, with the more advanced tribes. In Mexico, with a population of about thirteen millions, more than one-third are of mixed