Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 9.pdf/326

 be in the middle ages. The full legend of the wickedness of the half-breed is best to be learned from a drunken mean white from Virginia or the Cape. The half-breed, one hears, combines all the vices of either parent, he is wretchedly poor in health and spirit but vindictive, powerful, and dangerous to an extreme degree, his morals—the mean white has high and exacting standards—are indescribable even in whispers in a saloon, and so on and so on. There is really not an atom of evidence an unprejudiced mind would accept to sustain any belief of the sort. There is nothing to show that the children of racial admixture are, as a class, inherently either better or worse in any respect than either parent. There is an equally baseless theory that they are better, a theory displayed to a fine degree of foolishness in the article on Shakespeare in the "Encyclopædia Britannica." Both theories belong to the vast edifice of sham science that smothers the realities of modern knowledge. It may be that most "half-breeds" are failures in life, but that proves nothing. They are, in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and outcast from the normal education of either race; they are brought up in homes that are the battle-grounds of conflicting cultures; they labour under a heavy premium of disadvantage. There is, of course, a passing suggestion of Darwin's to account for atavism that might go to support the theory of the vileness of half-breeds, if it had ever been proved. But then it never has been proved. There is no proof in the matter at all.