THE PROBLEM FACED
II
THE PROBLEM FACED
The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a
spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at
the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in
numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political
equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into
close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially
different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering
invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or
obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question
of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where
it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined
constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has
been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically
impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent
may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of
language be called “white men’s countries.”[47] In the British West
Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to
constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two
races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown
Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may
rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member
of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical
islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his
tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and
political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter
of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do
not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.
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Footnote 47:
Mr. A. H. Stone (“The American Race Problem,” p. 230) points out that
“the Latin’s prejudice of colour is nowhere as strong as the
Teuton’s.” In the same excellent book I find this sentence quoted from
“The Foundations of Sociology,” by Professor E. A. Ross: “North
America from the Behring Sea to the Rio Grande is dedicated to the
highest type of civilisation; while for centuries the rest of our
hemisphere will drag the ball and chain of hybridism.”
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But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself
compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which,
whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its
impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from
his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the
European, and not always very vividly realized even by the Northern
American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal
observation and through the medium of books. The details of my
observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second