Page:The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind.djvu/37

 organize itself separately for political purposes, so that a permanent separation of parties will be created, which, because irrespective of the issues that naturally arise from time to time, may prevent those issues from being dealt with on their merits, and may check the natural ebbs and flows of political life. The nation will, in fact, be rather two nations than one, may waste its force on internal dissensions, may lose its unity of action at moments of public danger. Evils of this order tend to be more acute the more democratic a government becomes. Two courses are open, but each will have elements of danger. If political privileges are refused to the Backward race, the contrast between principle and practice, between a theoretic recognition of the rights of man as man and the denial of them to a section of the population, will be palpable and indefensible. If that lower section be admitted to share in the government, an element will be admitted the larger part of which will be unfit for the suffrage, being specially accessible to bribery and specially liable to intimidation. So, too, though the evils described may exist whatever be the condition of the lower race, they will become, in one sense at least, more accentuated the more that race advances in intelligence and knowledge. Slaves or serfs who have been bred up to look upon subjection as their natural lot bear it as the dispensation of Nature. When they have attained a measure of independence, when they speak the tongue and read the books and begin to share the ideas of the dominant race, they resent the inferiority, be it legal or social, to which they find themselves