Having thus laid before you the general lines on which I propose to deal
with problems relating to race and nationality, I propose now that we
should make a lightning trip round the world and cull, as we go, samples
which will illustrate the kind of friction which arises wherever races
or nationalities come into close contact. As I have already said, every
country can yield us material for our study, but none on such a vast
experimental scale as the United States of North America; we shall
therefore commence our hurried survey in that country. Within the
frontiers of the States is massed a population of 110 millions. When we
look closely we see that over ten millions of these inhabitants are
marked off from the rest by a frontier, a colour line, as sharply
defined and jealously guarded as the frontiers of a kingdom. Across that
racial frontier all legitimate social traffic is barred, the custodians
of the frontier being those who stand on the white side of the line. Any
attempt to cross that racial frontier produces mob war. While these ten
millions of segregated citizens abide within their racial fence, they
see millions arrive from Europe and pass freely through the national and
social gateways--which for them are barred. In the course of a
generation they see these new arrivals, men, women, and children born
and bred within the diverse nationalities of Europe, differing markedly
in appearance and speech from the original colonial stock, become slowly
stript of their alien outlook and gradually incorporated within a new
national mass. In the States, then, we see a machinery at work which
maintains racial frontiers but breaks down all national barriers. The
nature of that machinery we shall have to inquire into later, but in the
meantime I will briefly define the essential difference between a racial
and a national frontier. A marriage across a racial frontier gives rise
to an offspring so different from both parent races that it cannot be
naturally grouped with either the one or the other. A marriage across a
national frontier gives rise to a progeny which may pass as a member of
either parent nationality. Further, as I shall attempt to prove later,
nationality is the incipient stage in the process which leads on to
racial differentiation.