Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/31

Rh the peoples formed by the blending of Celts and Teutons in Western Britain, in North-Eastern Ireland, in North-Eastern France, and in Western Switzerland, are at least equal, if not superior, to the purer Low German or Norse, or Celtic peoples in other parts of those countries. The same may be said of the admixture of Slavs and Teutons in Northern and Eastern Germany. But the mixture of whites and negroes, or of whites and Hindus, or of the American aborigines and negroes, seldom shows good results. The hybrid stocks, if not inferior in physical strength to either of those whence they spring, are apparently less persistent, and might—so at least some observers hold—die out if they did not marry back into one or other of the parent-races. Usually, of course, they marry back into the lower.

Now and then a man of brilliant gifts appears in one of these mixed races. Alexandre Dumas, of whom one may say that if his imagination was not of the highest quality it was of almost unsurpassed fertility, was a mulatto or at least a quadroon. At this moment there is living in the United States the son of a white father and negro mother, himself born in slavery, who is one of the most remarkable personalities and perhaps the most moving and persuasive orator in that nation of eighty millions. Mexico has been ruled for a quarter of a century with equal vigour and wisdom by a man of mixed Indian and Spanish blood who ranks among the five or six foremost figures of our time.

In forming general conclusions, however, we must have regard not to single instances, however