THE MARTIN P. CATHERWOOD LIBRARY OF THE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924078705856 The Socialist Library. IV. The Socialist Library — IV. Idited by J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P. White Capital and Coloured Labour BY SYDNEY OLIVIER, C.M.G. If LONDON: INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY, 2j, Bride Lane, E.C. igo6. -'HO, PROPERTY OF LIBRARY III V?M1!/ CI*"" 's*"5"'1 ( 7 !^ . t SUMMARY OF CONTENTS. Chapter I, Introductory. Intention of the book. The doctrine of the White Man's Burden. Industrial Confrontation of White and Black as Employer and Employee. Industrial relation complicated by distinction of Race. Imperialist sentiment philanthropic, but Imperial Expansion not imdertaken for reasons of philanthropy. Endeavour to clear the subject of illusion. The efficient motive of colonisation economic, not humanitarian ... i Chapter II. Race. Causes of Racial distinctions. These distinctions a limitation of humanity and do not over-ride individuality. Completeness and limitation of racial consciousness. Racial Godhead. Inter- racial criticism necessarily partial and imper- tinent II Chapter 111. Race Fusion. The Theory of insuperable race-barriers. Its necessary instability. Inter-breeding. Physio- logical aspect of hybridization. Psychological consequences : — double and multiple conscious- ness. Theological consequences : dethronement of the racial God. Invincibility of conquered races. Analogy of racial and sexual differentia- tion and limitations 19 Chapter IV. The Transplanted African. Race Relations in the United States and the British West Indies. Social and industrial conditions in the West Indies. Society in Jamaica. Attenuation of colour-prejudice. Aversion to inter-mixture by marriage. Con- sideration of the results of inter-breeding. Social value of the class of mixed descent 29 Chapter V. The Transplanted African. (2) Colour relations much healthier in the West Indies than in the United States or South Africa. Examination of colour-prejudice in the United States. The terror of "Social Equality." American apprehensions contra- dicted by West Indian experience. The impu- dence of the Negro. His alleged licentiousness. His provocations in the American attitude ... 41 Chapter VI. The Transplanted African. (3) The political difficulty in America an important source of trouble. Democracy and universal suffrage avoided in the West Indies. The self- protective illegalities of the Southern Whites. The dangers of Negrophobia. Its absence in the West Indies. Irrationality and danger of the colour-line 52 Chapter VII. American Corroborations. Testimony of American writers, Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox and Professor Josiah Royce, in corrobo- ration of views set forth in the foregoing chapter ... ... ... ... ... ... 5i Note. Since this book has been in the Press a similar article, by P. F. Mather, corroborating the views set forth, has appeared in the Arena for October, igo6. Chapter VIII. The Idleness of the African. The standard of servile virtue, applied in England to the working class, in the tropics to the Negro. The European worker works hard because he is compelled by fear of starvation. The African does not because he is not under such compul- sion. Why he works better in some respects as a slave. Why indentured Indian labour is employed in the West Indies. The intractability of the African to the capitalist industrial system. 72 Chapter IX. Black Labour in South Africa. The Bantu Race. The South African Native Affairs Commission. Their view of the indus- trial disposition of the African. The Native labour supply, its deficiency to the demand. Character of this demand, not an organic need of the community, but a demand on the part of foreign capital for labour force to be used for the profit of foreign investors. Unlimited character of this demand. Effects of the capitalist demand for labour on the attitude of White towards Black. The theory that the Native must be taught and induced to work. The Commission's criticism of a land policy directed to this end 85 Chapter X. The Uncolonised African. Conditions in West Africa. Earlier European contact mainly for purposes of trade. The Natives willing traders. Hardly any settlement of Europeans for productive agriculture or manufacture, except a few mining ventures. British administration devoted to opening up. countries to trade, and imposing peace between tribes. The new departure in certain districts, such as the Congo Free State. Capitalist exploitation carried on by forced levies instead of by employment of wage labour. Modern slavery in Portuguese East Africa. Apart from forcible oppression and the compulsion of starvation no human being tolerates the unregulated demands of capitalist employment no Chapter XI. Indentured Immigrant Labour. The general basis of Indentured Immigration ; the pressure of hunger. Legal penalties for idleness in the employee unnecessary in civilised countries, but necessary to the employer where starvation does not threaten. Protection of the employee against the employer secured by immigration laws in British colonies as it has had to be secured by Factory Laws in Great Britain ... ... ... ... ... ... 121 Chapter Xli. The Industrial Factor in Race Prejudice. The danger of unlimited authority. Its aggrava- tions by racial distinction. The providential insensibility of coloured races. The increase of colour prejudice in America concurrently with the increase of manufacturing industry in the South. The negation of native rights in the Congo State. Change in the European theory with regard to the humanity of the African races as European contact has changed from missionary and trading connection to industrial and exploiting connection 126 Chapter XIII. J The Missionary Plea. The motives bringing white men into contact with black, the missionary and the economic. Should ■white enterprise be excluded from black countries ? The theory of educative protection. The theory of the White Man's Burden. Its futility, because men will not colonise from missionary motives. The disillusionment of the savage with regard to Christianity when he comes into real contact with the business European 132 / Chapter XIV. Educational Problems. Interbreeding unimportant in the principal areas of contact between white and black. Tendency of employing class to disparage educational capacity of the employee. Character of the African's intelligence. Its practical sensibility. Programme of manual instruction. The danger of evangelical missions. The spiritual tempera- ment of the African. Impossibility of dealing with him by force alone, or as a child. His attitude in practical politics 141 Chapter XV. J The Influence of the White on the Black. The white man a force whose leadership and significance the black cannot ignore. How far the African will imitate and learn. The white man will reap what he sows, not moral results from commercial seekings. The importance of the personal attitude 153 \ Chapter XVI. Short Views and Long Views on White and Black. Short views necessary for the practical politician and business man. The exigencies of im- mediate contact with savages create antagon- isms and promote rough and ready methods. Savagery not a racial characteristic but common to all people in certain stages of development. The long view, justified by its application in the British West Indies, that savage characteristics in the African will yield the same influences as have modified them in the European i^o WHITE CAPITAL AND COLOURED LABOUR. I. LNFTRODUCTORY. The purpose of these chapters is to discuss some aspects of the problems that arise out of intercourse between civilised Europeans, considered characteristically in their com- mercial and employing activities.and coloured, especially African, races, confronted with the White man in the character of manual producers and labourers, employed or sought to be employed by the commercial and pro- ductive enterprise of the European. What is the White man going to make of the Black, or the Black of the White in industry ? A good deal has been written of late on this subject, under the stimulus of the rapidly growing interests of White capitalism in Tropical labour, since the principal European Governments arranged for the partition of Africa. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has idealised one view of it for popular currency in his catchword "The White Man's Burden," Other writers have discoursed of "The Control of the Tropics," and "The Government of Tropical Dependencies." A theory is declar- ing itself, not essentially inhumane or re- actionary, but adopted in cruder forms by the colonising class whose activity and enterprise create the situation to be dealt with, and markedly influential with some of the states- men and administrators who have to deal with that situation, a theory which may be briefly summarised thus : Tropical countries are not suited for settlement by Whites. Europeans cannot labour and bring up families there. The Black can breed and labour under good government, but he cannot develop his own country's resources. He is brutish, benighted, and unprogressive. The principal reason of this condition is that his life is made so easy for him by nature that he is not forced to work. The White man, therefore, must, in the interests of humanity, make arrangements to induce the Black man to work for him. To him the economic profit, which the Black does not value and cannot use ; to the latter the moral and social advancement and elevation. To effect this development is the " White Man's Burden " ; in this way must we control the tropics ; along these lines alone can the problem of racial relations in our new possessions be solved. To the writer it appears that the problem contains gome elements of which this diagnosis takes too little account. "Half-devil and half-child " is the generic description offered of the material to be dealt with, and we need not altogether protest against it. But doubt and demur begin to make themselves felt as soon as we begin to consider the question What kind of a saint it is supposed can be made of the Devil, and what kind of a man of the Child. The savage is not " civilised " ; is he capable of growing at all into the industrial forms of our civilisation ? Are we quite sure, that it is desirable that he should do so ? We speak of racial charac- eristics. What is Race? How deep do its characteristics go? What is there in humanity that is beneath or beyond Race? And is it not conceivable that some part of that which in savage races is devilish or childish to our ideas is the evidence of a force or potentiality that may be a wholesome solvent of the conventions of our own racial and particular civilisation ? The African races, considered especially in their two principal stocks of Negro and Bantu, make up the most important uncivil- ised mass of coloured humanity. The Negro race has already, more than any other, been brought into intimate and influential contact with Europeans in the institution of slavery ; with this we have experimented in the West Indies and in America under varying social fipd economic co^^ditions. The Asiatic r^ces, 4 in some cases less alien from us, seem to be further matured in their evolution, more stereo- typed, and to offer less material for develop- ment and specialisation. They have evolved civilisations of their own, their populations have grown to the limit of their economic resources. European permeation and exploita- tion of China are hardly conceivable, in the sense in which we are beholding European permeation and exploitation of Africa. The populations of India seem little likely, within imaginable time, notwithstanding the probable growth of manufacturing industry under foreign direction among them, very greatly to alter their industrial and commercial relations towards us. The Indian, indeed, perhaps because he is less alien in race, is much more amenable to capitalist industrial methods than the African : the problems which the latter offers do not arise with him. The Red Indian, the American Indian races in general, are a dwindling and effete survival, the Pacific Island races have not the expansive fertility and the colonising vigour of the Negro. I propose, then, to discuss, first of all the topic of Race, so as to clear the ground as far as possible of prejudice, and of some dogmatic assumptions which superficial observers are prone to make about the unalterable limita- tions of racial faculty. It is unquestionable that the special racial cliaracteristics of one race may fail entirely to find a sympathetic response in another, whose own special racial characteristics offer a stubbornly unimpres- sionable front to appeals which to the former appear to express the perfection of human reason. The Organon, or Logic, of inter- racial intercourse is still rudimentary. At present, the efficient conducting of such intercourse is a temperamental matter, an art ; but its methods are, after all, no mystery. The faculty of dealing with savage races, like that of dealing with children, is largely a personal gift, but it rests upon reason. It is essential to attempt to do justice to the special psychological and temperamental constitution of the African races, and to realise the conditions of life under which that mental attitude has been evolved. It is often alleged that " the native mind " of the African is inscrutable. Perhaps so : but much of its working is unaccountable only to the spectator who considers it exclu- sively from the standpoint of his own pursuits and interests. We shall do well, therefore, some- what fully to examine the phenomena presented in populations of African origin which have been transplanted from ,their native environ- ment and kept under the continuous influence of the White man — first in slavery, and, subse- quently, as a free proletariat. The material for this survey lies in the British West Indies and in the Southern States of the American Common- wealth. Returning thence to Africa, we may examine the conditions prevailing in Europead colonies there, overlying a native population, and follow the track of our survey into those regions where real colonihation is not attempted but the problem is simply that of the opening and control of tropical countries for the profit of the White investor. Under all these diverse conditions one complaint on the part of the White is con- stant : that the Black man is lazy. And at the back of the Black man's mind there per- sists (not, as a rule, expressed — sometimes most profoundly dissembled) a rooted convic- tion that the White man is. there to get the better of him, the Black. Both impressions are justified, and neither is entirely and finally just. It must be admitted and borne in mind, that the public opinion that supports European Imperialism in Africa is, on the whole, a philanthropically disposed public opinion, and that there is a good deal of justification for satisfaction with the results, even allow- ing for all that must be said of loss to the natives. White administration does what nativea dministration in African communities never has succeeded in doing with any perman- ence, either at home or in Hayti : it does keep the peace and establish a basis for civil devel- opment. It is hardly, however, legitimate for any European nation to take credit for these results, as though they had been the object of its colonisation. With rare and particular exceptions, so peculiar in their circumstances as to serve merely as proof of the rule (such as the annexation of British Bechuanaland) no nation has ever colonised, annexed, or es- tablished a sphere of influence from motives of philanthropy towards the native popula- tion. The motive cause of such action has been the interest, immediate or future, of European colonists, merchants or treasure- seekers, or to punish aggression on missionaries or explorers. And where punishment has been the object, or even where allegiance has been tendered for the purpose of getting protection, it has frequently been refused (notwithstand- ing all the benefits that European rule would bring), where no economic interest backed the demand. The recent partition of Africa was not engaged in and carried out from any philanthropic or humanitarian motive, but in order to ensure that the markets of the several divisions should be kept open to the several Powers that appropriated them, or, in some cases, to guarantee the frontiers of previous acquisitions from mo- lestation. It is essential that this subject be approached with an intelligence clear of cant. It is unjust to denounce the partition of Africa and the intercourse of the White with the Black as an unmixed evil for the latter ; it is unjust (in most cases) to condemn European administra- 8 tors and officials as merely parasites on t'he countries they govern, whether India or others; but we must set out with a clear recognition of the fact that when the Euro- pean colonises or annexes tropical countries the force that sets him in motion is a desire for commercial or industrial profit, and not a desire to take up the " White Man's Burden." When he really wants to do that, he becomes a missionary. There is no disparagement to the European in recognising and bearing in mind this fundamental fact. He has an un- deniable right to go and peacefully seek his fortune in any part of the world without molestation. He only becomes distasteful when he begins to condemn and coerce un- civilised peoples into the mould of his personal interests under the pretext of doing them good. In hardly any nation except England and the United States is it possible, or thought necessary, that there should be a public pre- tence of international philanthropy in con- nection with Imperial expansion. Such a pretence was deliberately fomented in the United States to justify the Americo-Spanish War of i8g8, the annexation of Porto Rico and the Philippines and the commercial annexa- tion of Cuba into the sphere of American exploitation, and such a pretence is almost always professed in England whenever we have similar exploits on foot. If, when we have come into contact with aboriginal races 9 through such pursuit of our interests, we SO order our dealings that benefits, on the whole, result to them (which is far from being entirely or always the case), if it may really be to the natives' interest that the White man should exploit his labour, that is no reason at all for taking moral credit to ourselves for colonisation. The native (bear this always well in mind) is not deceived in this matter. Hence arises that fundamental suspicion in him that we resent as so unjustifiable and uncharitable. Hence what we denounce as his treacheries and his rebellions. Moreover, no more than the trading or settling colonists do the men who go to these colonies to take ;part in the government go there from philan- ithropy. They go, as a rule, primarily to jmake their living, and though they may I exhibit the spirit of a devoted public service, it must always be remembered that to the native they and their dependents are merely a set of rulers, making a living out of his coimtry and out of the taxes he pays, because they cannot make it at home, and interfering with him as a pretext for doing so. We must disenchant the facts and eliminate all the glamour which our assurance as to our own moral standards and our desire to think the best of ourselves hang about them, before we can hope to form any judg- ment of the aspect in which those facts appear to the African. 1 write without prejudice either as " Irri- perialist" or as "Anti-Imperialist," because it appears to me that in matters of colonisa- tion and conquest the moral or philosophical criticism follows after, and is quite secondary in importance to, the facts of the will and interest. These lead : the necessities of survival determine expansion. No colony can be made by a theory of Imperialism : it can only be made by people who want to colonise and are capable of maintaining themselves as colonists. And it is between these persons and the natives of colonised countries that the questions I wish to deal with arise. The problems of conquest and settlement — the topics of native wars and rebellions — are preliminary to those of industrial relations, and it is no part of my purpose here to discuss their ethics. 11. RACE. What makes Race ? It is possible, evidently, — since many people habitually do so — to conceive of races as special creations and of the individuals that compose them as beings independently created : characters entering life on earth in suitably assigned or chosen environment. But we are, I think, entitled to deal with the moulding causes of Race from the point of view of evolutionary biology, to believe, that is, that the cerebral and temperamental distinctions of Races have been determined and established, like their bodily differences, by the pressure of environment throughout the course of material evolution. 1 take it that the distinctions (1 do not say the human similarities) exhibited by Races can be validly explained on Darwinian principles, and that whatever may be deemed essentially human (or essentially divine, if you will) in Man, it is certainly not his distinctions in the category of Race. There are qualities common to all races, in greater or less degree, which we recognise as specifically human, and about which great controversy has indecisively raged, as to how they could have been pro- H duced by Natural Selection: the musical sense, for example ; and, still more remark- ably and puzzlingly, we find in distinct races, remote in time and place, exhibitions of very specialised and elaborate human faculty and achievement in Art, Science, Philosophy, and Religion, for the birth of which it appears quite impossible to assign any plausible ex- planation in parallel biological causes arising out of identity in physical environment. But special differentiating characteristics of races may confidently be said to be, in great measure at any rate, reactions of the physical environ- ment of a stock realising its will-to-live continuously and progressively under adverse, but not insuperable conditions, little altered through long periods of time. We may even go so far as to say that the special race characteristics which such protracted process will evolve, although they are, for the Race concerned, a necessary condition of its exis- tence in its environment, are probably, at any rate, are often, limitations, excrescences or shortcomings of Humanity. It is possible to hold this judgment, both as to the savage and the civilised, without implying the dogmatic assertion of any essential or final Human type. Moreover, as a further preliminary caution, one salient, ubiquitous reality must also be borne in mind : the infinite, inexhaustible distinctness of personality between individuals, so much a fundamental fact of life that one 13 almost would say that the amalgamating race-characteristics are merely incrustations concealing this sparkling variety. It is common enough, indeed, for hasty observers, whose faculties of perception and sympathy are baffled by their racial limitations, to tell us that the people of some foreign tribe or nation are all precisely alike, both in face and character : intelligent and sympathetic obser- vation, however, will always disclose, under every human complexion and civilisation, the same independent definition of each individual that everyone imputes unquestioningly to the persons of his own intimate circle. Not even " two peas " are really alike, and no observant gardener would use the vulgar adage. Yet, again, notwithstanding all this variety amongst individuals — far wider than the variety among races — we meet, so far as Race does not preclude us from seeing it, in every human being an ultimate, unmistakable like- ness, transcending Family, Race, and Nation alike, yet in no wise overbearing, nor trans- cending, nor neutralising his own individuality, but rather establishing and completing it, and at the same time knitting it up with our own. What circumstances produce the typical race, the race that the Greek poets spoke of as " autochthonous " — sprung from the soil ? First and chiefly the Earth — long settlement in the same country and climate. These in- livieRces having done their work, a racial type may persist in a race become nomadic and cosmopolitan, as the Jews and the Gipsies, yet even these are modified by their domicile, and the Jew of different countries is not difficult to distinguish at sight to a trained observer. The ancient race -theory — the myth of actual earth-parentage — is practically the true account of the greater part of the matter. ! Whatever may be the cause or creative force I of Humanity, the cause and moulding force I of Race appears as local environment. It is necessary, perhaps, to emphasise this, because, to a mongrel town-dwelling population it tends to present itself as merely a poetical figure of speech. Towns do not produce races, they destroy them, as London kills out its immigrant families by the third generation. Towns doubtless produce popular types, as London the cockney, but that is a different thing. Such types vary rapidly. The town- dweller who has not himself experienced the moulding and nourishing power of Earth in natural surroundings is likely and prone to suppose that the city may do what the country does, which is not the case- The production of the Boer race, one of well-marked physical and mental characteristics, notwithstanding that it is of mongrel immigrant origin, Dutch, French, and in some degree British, is an instance of a people developed into a Race, within modem record, by the motherhood of the Sou^h African yeldt, a witness of the race- 15 making power of the Earth still at work in her uncocknified regions. When a race lias established and maintained itself for generations in a particular environ- ment — a primitive race not reaching as yet a very high degree of civilisation — and has staved off the revolutionary effects of excess of population by means of infanticide, organ- ised emigration, or moderate chronic war with its neighbours, it will have fitted all its bodily adaptation and the processes of its daily life so accurately and so fully into the mould of its natural surroundings that it will not be conscious of itself as other than a part of nature. Such a race, in the vigour of its maturity, is a full cup ; its form is saturated to the skin with the energy that has forced it into the mould of life appointed ; it is sensitive at the surface, reacting immediately according to its own native impulse, not critical of its impulses, not hesitant between feeling and action, thought and word, not sceptical where it believes. It is very fully aware of the things of its own world ; it is not aware of, and does not imagine, things outside of it. The invisible, for it, abuts entirely upon, and is concerned only with, its own visible world. The habitual religiosity of the pagan result- ing from this condition is unimaginable, unintelligible to the faculties of the Christian invader, whose religion is for the most part a detachable property, a matter of clergy anc} i6 Sundays. The only forces the primitive race knows are those that mould, impel, and attack it: its Gods arid Devils are all concerned with itself ; and thus it comes about that each natural race, when it comes to personify the invisible, no matter whether its god be singular or plural, its devils one or legion, believes and feels and knows itself to be a "chosen people." I say "knows itself" because its knowledge, like the rest of its life, will have followed the mould of its biological evolution, and because it will have acquired only such faculties of theory and understand- ing as its environment has determined. And accordingly when, confronted with other tribal gods, it enters upon theological criticism, it lays down unhesitatingly (if it has any sufficient self-respect) that all those gods are but idols, but that it is its Lord that made the heavens. Moreover, it will, from precisely similar causes, develop the belief that it is the crown of Creation, free Man, and it only, and that all other nations are outer barbarians, Gentiles, savages, and by nature designed to be slaves, which it, the chosen people, will never, never be. This has constantly been the expressed theory of national sociologists in more or less primitive peoples, when they have passed into a self-conscious critical stage. Even Aristotle could not transcend this universal illusion. In this country, even among our confusedly i7 blended people, it had come, a few years ago, td be so unquestioningly and universally held, that Mr. Kipling's " Recessional," which expressed some post-piandial qualms in regard to it, was hailed by our national critics as an effort of superhuman inspiration, almost blasphemous in the audacity of its humility. Because of their evolution in different en- vironments and their differences in physical adaptation, all pure races of necessity differ one from another in their capacities, their knowledge, and their powers ; and each pure race, so far as it works by the light of its own formulated conscious knowledge and critical and logical habits, is constitutionally unfitted for understanding or even imagining the exist- ence of much that enters into the life of each of all other races and may be either the most sacred or the most commonplace thing in that life. Further, it is noticeable that more than one of the races of which we habitually speak as inferior, and which appear to be effete or decaying, are far in advance of the com- mercial Caucasian who is our own type and standard, not only in some of the most desirable and pleasant human qualities, but in artistic, poetical, and other of the higher spiritual forms of genius or faculty. When therefore individuals of different races are confronted, each is largely devoid of mental appliances for apprehending even the exis- tence, far more so for understanding the sig- nificance of much that is vividly alive and permanently important in the consciousness of the Alien. The one cannot perceive that the other is a full cup ; he makes for himself a ridiculous broken caricature of a few strik- ing characteristics as a hypothesis of the foreign creature's nature, and fills out the figure with the attributes of the children, the imbeciles and the criminals of his own na- tionality. I cannot refer to a better corrective of the style of illusion in relation to savage races than the late Miss Mary Kingsley's books on West Africa, in which, with a fine direct sympathy, the insight of the plain wo- man of genius, she analysed and appreciated the psychology of the native tribes of the " Coast " ; quite seriously taking them as rational human beings to be weighed in the same scales as the white races. The criticism, therefore, which one race may pass upon another will almost always be somewhat impertinent and provincial. Com- plete apprehension of the racial point of view, complete recognition of what it really is that the alien means by his formulas, is hardly to be attained. In many cases a meaning com- mon to both races is disguised by different modes of expression ; in many the two are con- stitutionally incapable of meaning quite the same thing. A clear understanding is essen- tial between those who are to be fused into one organic community. What avenues have we towards inter-racial understanding ? III. RACE FUSION. We are confronted, in the United States, in South Africa, in India and elsewhere, with a belief on the part of the naajority of the European section that the white and the coloured can blend no more than oiland water. Whatever be the explanations of race prejudice, and whatever our judgment of its significance, we must recognise its existence as a fact of solid importance in regard to coloured societies. On the other hand, it is evident that with a vigorous native stock no stable mixed com munity can grow up so long as colour- prejudice and race antagonism maintain their supremacy. Such a condition is only com- patible with the institution of slavery. Whether the white man likes it or not, the fact must be faced that imder the modern system of industry, which deals with the coloured man as an independent wage-earner, and in which he has the stimulus of the white man's ideals of education, the coloured man must advance, and he visibly does advance, to a level of imderstanding and self-reliance in which he will not accept the negrophobist theory of exclusion. Especially will this be 19 20 the case if the doctrines of Christianity ar6 communicated to the natives, and the New Testament placed in their hands; as the feudalism of Europe discovered when the same revolutionary matter got into the heads and hands of its peasantries. The condition of the society in which this process is taking place grows increasingly unstable, unless the race prejudice and race division are modified" How can this come about ? In the history of the world it has practic- ally come about to a vast extent by inter- breeding and mixture of races. And though the idea of this method may be scouted as out of the range of practical consideration or influence in connection with modern colour problems, and though I should admit that it may tend to diminish in importance as com- pared with direct mental influences, yet I consider that the tendency of opinion and sentiment at the present in the ascendant is unduly to undervalue its real importance, and I propose to give reasons for thinking that where it takes place it is advantageous. We should at least give full credit to its possibil- ities before passing to consider other methods of fusion. The question of the relations between black and white is obscured by a mass of prejudice and ignorance and blindness, proportional to the isolating differences in their evolved con- stitutions. These barriers are not different in 21 kind or in strength from those which once separated neighbouring European tribes. What has happened as between these we can trace and recognise, and this recognition will help us to approach the contemporary problem. What happens when two persons of differ- ent race intermarry? Each race, we have argued, has evolved its own specialised body, adapted to a certain range of human cap- acities- In neither case, one may say in no possible case, is the race-body (including the brain and nervous system) anything approach ing to a competent vehicle of all the qualities and powers that we imply by humanity. Of course, we have had Very splendid and comprehensive human types among those races of whose activities and productions records remain, and doubtless there have been others equally capable, of which we have no record, but none that we can judge of (I certainly should not accept the Greeks of the Periclean age) come near to satisfying us as completely capable of all the human apprehension and activity known to us. I do not wish to overweigh this idea of the limitation of racial faculty which will always yield, more or less, to educational influ- ences. The truly great men of all races are visibly near akin. Each race, too, I have argued, is likely to exhibit habitually a good deal of human faculty that is absent in the Other. So far, then, as there survives in ^ mixed race the racial body of each of its parents, so far it is a superior human being, or rather, I would say, potentially a more competent vehicle of humanity. I say this with reservation, because there are certain sets-off to the advantages of hybridisation which must be taken into account, and to which I shall return later. To people who have a horror of " colour " I would here ob- serve that lam thinking not only of mulattoes or crosses with coloured races, but equally of the European interbreedings that have produced the most progressive of " white " nations, in- cluding our own, and of blends of coloured races. The physiological aspect of hybridisation may be likened to the process of candy-pulling, in the making of sticks of striped sweetstuff. The human body, we learn (at this stage of microscope manufacture), originates from the union of two cells. Each cell, theoretically (so I read) can build up a whole new body by itself. In practice it habitually combines for the work with another cell, supplied by a parent of opposite sex. Now these two cells, if I do not misrepresent the accepted physio- logical hypothesis, do not set to work on the principle of the division of labour and specialisation of function, each to build up that part of the new body which it can do best — in which case we might have the Caucasian brain protected by the African 33 skull, to say nothing of such more valuable combinations as everyone can imagine for himself — but proceed to develop themselves in conjunction throughout the whole process of cell-building, so that every cell in the body may be said to consist of a thread of the race of each parent, side by side with a thread of that of the other. If, therefore, both threads hold their vigour throughout, it would appear that the force that goes to the making of man has at any rate a more widely ranging instru- ment to play on for its purposes. How far it will be a stronger, and how far, as it often is in some respects, a less reliable instrument, will depend on a great many things on which it is tolerably easy to weave theories, but dangerous to attempt to dogmatise. When the hybrid of a first cross pairs with another of the similar cross, the threads of each race element in each cell will be doubled and twice as fine. You see this when you double your first two amalgamated sticks of white and red sugar and pull them out again. And as you double and double and pull again and again, you get in time from a streaked mechanical combination of red and white what comes to look like a homogeneous mass of pink. In the course of a number of generations of interbreeding of hybrids of two original races you get something like a real new race com- bining in a true amalgam the capacities of |30tl|. 24 Now the fact is that the distinction between the two sets of threads does persist for a great many generations, notwithstanding the modi- fying influence of environment, which tends to overcome the immigrant type, or both types if the home of the hybrid race is different from that of either parent. At first, however, in many cases the hybrid will really be obviously and conspicuously two kinds of man. When the red cell and the white have done their parts side by side, they will be conscious of and internally criticise one another. This very often spoils the hybrid's digestion. Quite often, of course, the joint work is more efificient. And sometimes, when the white cell has done work unfamiliar to the red or the red to the white, the one may have been unable to maintain any balance with the other, and will probably be quite unable to control its proceedings when its primitive instincts are strongly aroused. Indeed it would appear, in occasional crises, as though the whole vitality, power, and consciousness transferred itself to one side of the combination, as occurs in case of multiple personality under hypnotic influence. And this transference is by no means always to the side of the race reputed inferior. If the mulatto may " go Fantee " he may also, at times, entirely shed his African instincts and consciousness. 3uch cases, howeyer, are rare : for the most 25 part there appears to be a mixture of character with a good deal of double consciousness, so that to a fortunately constituted hybrid his ancestors are a perpetual feast ; he knows them from inside, and he sees them from out- side simultaneously. I do not go so far as to say that a man to be a good critic must be a hybrid, but I fancy it would be found to be pretty true. The foreigner constantly makes the mistake of thinking that Englishmen and Scotsmen are hypocrites. Only one who is both an Englishman and a foreigner — whether Irish, Welsh, Cornish, French, Spaniard, German, or Jew on his alien side, can really appreciate and enjoy to the full the gorgeous feast of contemporary British psychology. Its most humorous, because most sympathetic, satirists are Englishmen of mixed race. A further characteristic in the hybrid as distinguished from the man of pure race may be usefully noted. Whereas the pure race in its prime knows one Man only, itself, and one God, its own Will, the hybrid is incapable of this exclusive racial pride, and inevitably becomes aware that there is something, the something that we call the Human, which is greater than the one race or the other, and something in the nature of spiritual power that is stronger than national God or Will. What were, to each separate race, final forms of truth, become, when competing in the focus pf our human consciousness, inutually 26 destructive, and each recognisably insufficient. Yet the hybrid finds himself still very much alive, and not at all extinguished with the collapse of his racial theories. An experience somewhat similar occurs to a race whose racial God is deposed by con- quest : and where a conquered race has not, as the Jews and several other nomad races have done, transcended the usual domiciliary and settled habits of permanent races, has not spiritualised and mobilised its God and moved conquering among its nominal conquerors, we have seen either a practically Atheistic philosophy adopted, of renunciation of the Will, or a second new God set up, as among the mixed broken peoples of the Roman Empire, the God of the human and the conquered, who knows himself something more than his conqueror. Even Imperial Rome, which went further in its deification of of its own will than any great people on earth, by making its Commander-in-Chief, its Caesar, its national God, was captured by the reaction of the culture of the nations whom it overran. The flood of Oriental mysticism swamped the old tribal fetichism of Rome, and thus prepared the way for much of what grew into Christianity. But it is not only cultured and civilised races that know themselves more than the beefwitted race that conquers them. I pass from the case of hybridised peoples and deal 27 with that of the survivors of an ancient con- quered race. If they avoid physical degenera- tion, as, retaining their old habitat, there is no presumption that they will not, they do remain to a great extent invincible. So long as they remain a race their God, their Will, their pride of place as the chosen people, survives ; and they see, often, that the conqueror is only a heavy-fisted brute, to whom they know them- selves superior, not, indeed, in all valuable qualities, but in many of those which man- kind most values and which are most distinctively human. We need not speak yet of the African, or even of the Hindoo. The Irish, doubtless, recognise that the English have great qualities, and yet it has not been possible for them to accept English rule. All other nations of the world do Irishmen the justice of perceiving that they have a share of the qualities the absence of which in the typical Englishman has rendered him pretty widely disliked, and when not feared, despised, as lacking in essential humanities. Now not only the Irish race under the English, but every conquered race that remains unmixed, retains in itself this seed of invincibility, this treasure that it has and its conqueror has not, which makes it the superior of its conqueror, so long as he treats it not as human but as alien and inferior. I believe that every race (not hybridised) despises its conqueror, just as woman treated likewise by man despises hirn^ ; 28 to the full as much as he in his claim to the lordship of creation disparages her. In fact, the lack of mutual understanding that arises from Race is strikingly analogous to that which arises from difEerence of sex, both in its origins and in its manifestations. The origin is bound up with differences of bodily adaption and function. How common it is for each sex, in moments of irritation, to charge the other with perfidy and lack of straightforward- ness. How universal is this same accusation between different races But the fact is that the truth is really different for different races and for the different sexes. They live to some extent in different worlds. A conquered race that speaks two languages will tell the truth in its own language, and will lie in that of its conquerors — very often from an honest desire to tell what it supposes to be the conqueror's truth, namely, what he desires, what is real for him through expressing his will. This phenomenon is familiar from the Groves of Blarney to the haunts of the Heathen Chinee. tv. THE TRANSPLANTED AFRICAN. (I.) The future of the relations between White Capital and Coloured Labour depends so largely on the possibility of Race-fusion either by the bodily process of blending by intermarriage, or by some alternative psychical process of establishing sympathetic under- standing, that we must examine what, be it little or much, has been done in this direction in those communities in which people of European and African races have been forced into close social contact. This has been most markedly the case in European Colonies into which Africans were introduced as slaves, and in which such contact has been closely main- tained for generations without the neutralising influence of a background of savagery, such as has existed in African countries. Here, then, I will proceed to deal with the results which have been manifested in such mixed communities in the West Indies and the United States, glancing first at the results of inter- breeding, and subsequently at the effects and promise of other influences. The writer of these chapters has for many years been connected with and concerned in 29 30 tlie administration of British West Indiaii Colonies, in which the great bulk of the population is descended from African slaves and is still very largely of pure African race. He has resided in or has visited all these Colonies, except the Bahama group, in- cluding British Guiana and British Honduras. He has spent nearly five years in the Island of Jamaica, and has a special and fairly thorough knowledge of that community. In no field is there better material for a study of the effects of the prolonged collocation of White and Black in the relation of employer and employed ; and, whilst the different con- ditions of other colonies have produced some- what different results, an understanding of the phenomena of Jamaican society may be regarded as affording a very good founda- tion for a judgment as to the possibilities of racial interaction in any such British com- munity. With regard to Foreign Colonial communities, of which I have no direct know- ledge, I do not propose to attempt to generalise. It is still not uncommon to hear West Indian eulogists of the good old days en- larging on the industrial virtues of the old- time slave as compared with the type of free negro produced by two generations of eman- cipation. These moralists belong strictly to the same school as those who preach, else- where, the necessity for forced labour for the 31 improvement of the African in his owii country. Whatever may be the weight of their argument on that line, we may at any rate accept from them the implied admission that the African is capable of improvement, that there was evolved imder slavery in the West Indies something humanly superior to the West African pagan. They will even maintain that the old-time negro exhibited often a high and effectual example of the Christian religion, that he was personally loyal and devoted to his masters and their families, and that he was a capable and in- dustrious labourer and artisan. Let us bear in mind these admissions and survey the present condition of the transplanted negro, and see what vestiges of social virtue are left him. We will then approach his position in indus- trial relations, and consider what this por- tends. In all the British West Indies the coloured population enormously outnumbers the White. The social and industrial conditions vary considerably. Where the sugar industry sur- vives as the principal support of the com- munity, the land is still for the most part held in biggish estates, and the labouring population is employed at wages. This is especially the case in Barbados, Antigua, and St. Kitts. It is the circumstance that land has been so monopolised, and that the descen- dants of the slaves have therefore been com- 3^ pelied to work on the estates for such wages as the estates would give, that alone main- tained the sugar industry in these islands, whilst it failed to so great an extent where the negro was not under like compulsion to work. And it is in islands and districts where the sugar estate industry has been thus main- tained that the condition of the West Indian negro is poorest and most degraded. In the more important colonies of Trinidad and Demerara the labour supply for estates is principally provided by indentured East Indian coolies, whilst the bulk of the negro population is settled, as it is in Grenada, Dominica, and Montserrat, under conditions more nearly approaching those which are to be found most fully established in Jamaica, that is to say, as a peasant proprietary, not primarily dependent upon wage employment, but supplying a more or less uncertain amount of labour available for the larger plantations. Setting Barbados apart as a unique community, the future of which it would be exceedingly difficult to forecast, because there, owing to close land monopoly and great density of population, there is a thoroughly European confrontation of capitalist and proletariat classes, Jamaica may be taken as the type of what the ordinary British West Indian Colony appears destined to become. The people of Jamaica are mostly negroes, 33 with but little admixture of white blood. The predominant status is that of peasant proprietors, although in some districts con- siderable numbers still live and work for wages on estates, and own no land. But where they do not own land they almost always rent land, and depend largely for their maintenance upon its produce. The number of this class amounts to about 700,000. The extent to which land is distributed among them is indicated by the fact that out of 1 13,000 holdings of property on the Valuation Roll of the Island in 1905, io5,ooo were below /"loo, and 91,260 below £/^o in value. Practically all these small holdings are owned by the black peasantry and coloured people, the acreage varying from less than an acre to 50 or 100 acres. Next in number to the nearly pure negro peasant class comes the consider- able coloured class of mixed African and European descent, which largely supplies the artisans and tradesmen of the community. Very many of this class are landowners and planters, many are overseers and bookkeepers on estates, many commercial clerks, and some are engaged in the professions of law and medicine. Many clergy of all the Protestant denominations are black or coloured ; so are all the elementary schoolmasters and school- mistresses and some of the teachers in the few second grade schools. There are not more than 15,000 persons in the island (in- 34 eluding Jews) who claim to be of unmixed white race. These whites predominate in the governing and employing class, and as merchants or planters direct and lead the industrial life of the island. Now what are the social relations in this mixed community ? There is no artificial or conventional disqualification whatever to bar any Jamaican of negro or mixed race from occupying any position for which he is intel- lectually qualified in any department of the social life of the island, including the public service. Many coloured men are magistrates of Petty Sessions, more than one holds the office of Custos — that is to say, of chief magis- trate of their parishes ; more than one hold or have held stipendiary magistracies under the Government. These positions they fill with credit. According to their professional posi- tion they associate with the white residents on precisely the same terms as persons of pure European extraction. In practice it is the fact that the pure negro does not show the business capacity and ambition of the man of mixed race, and there are few, if any, persons of pure African extraction in positions of high consideration, authority, or responsibility. I would not be understood as asserting that there is not colour-prejudice in Jamaica, or in any other British West Indian Colony — that is to say, that there is in the minds of domi- ciled Europeans nothing answering to the 35 hostility and contempt towards black and coloured people which is boasted by many spokesmen of white folk in the Southern States of America and prevalent now in South Africa ; or that there is not, conversely, a latent jealousy of and hostility towards the "buckra" in the temperament of the black and coloured, which may lend itself on occa- sions to the inflammatory excitement of a cry of " Colour for colour. Race for race." Such prejudice, however, does not appear on the surface, and such as there is is unquestionably diminishing. It is strongest (on both sides) in the wom?n and on the woman's side of life. The late Mr. Grant Allen's novel, " In all Shades," depicting his impressions of colour-prejudice in Jamaican white society, as remembered from thirty or forty years ago, reads to-day as a grotesque extravagance, and might appear to have been imagined by a writer who had never been in the island, but who had read into its society the virulent colour-prejudice prevailing to-day in the Southern States of the American Union. But though in Jamaica and in other West Indian Colonies, there may be, in general social and professional relations, no barrier against intermixture, there is, beyond ques- tion, an aversion on the part of white Creoles to intermarriage with coloured families, and this aversion may, I think, be relied on, at any rate for a long time to come, to check, in 36 practice, any such obliteration of race dis- tinctions as is foreboded by negrophobists in the United States as the necessary result of the admission of social equality. It is true that in these Colonies you will occasionally find Creoles of mixed race in good positions married to ladies of pure European blood. But, as a rule, such mar- riages will not have been made in the Colony, but in England, where there is less sensibility on such matters. Again, you will find men of pure European extraction and good position with Creole wives of mixed race, though perhaps not without special information to be identified as such, nor disposed to be so identi- fied. Moreover, in the lower social ranks of em- ployees in stores, so far as these are recruited from Europe, such mixed marriages may fre- quently be met with. On the whole, however, it does not appear to me that admission to social and profes- sional equality, when resulting from compati- bility of temperament and interests, does, in fact, conduce necessarily or strongly to likeli- hood of intermarriage : at any rate of fre- quent and habitual and unhesitating inter- marriage. I myself began my connection with the West Indies under the prejudices of the theory of the degeneracy of the ofEspring of inter- breeding, which was commoner, perhaps, at that time, in the writings of anthropologists 37 than it is now ; but I have found myself unable to establish any judgment on the facts in support of any such sweeping generalisa- tion. The effects of a first cross are, no doubt, constitutionally disturbing, and many persons of mixed origin are of poor physique. But the phthisis and other diseases from which they suffer are equally common among the West Indian negro population of apparently pure African blood, and arise among these from the overcrowding of dwellings, bad nutrition, insanitary habits, and other pre- ventible causes. There may naturally be aversion on the part of and a strong social objection on behalf of the white woman against her marriage with a black or coloured man.- There is no correspondingly strong instinctive aversion, nor is there so strong an ostensible social objection to a white man's marrying a woman of mixed descent. The latter kind of union is much more likely to occur than the former. There is good biolo- gical reason for this distinction. Whatever the potentialities of the African stocks as a vehicle for human manifestation, and I myself believe them to be, like those of the Russian people, exceedingly important and valuable — a matrix of emotional and spiritual energies that have yet to find their human expression in suitably adapted forms — the white races are now, in fact, by far the further advanced in effectual human development, and it would 3§ be expedient on this account alone that their maternity should be economised to the utmost. A woman may be the mother of a limited number of children, and our notion of the number advisable is contracting : it is bad natural economy, and instinct very potently opposes it, to breed backwards from her. There is no such reason against the begetting of children by white men in countries where, if they are to breed at all, it must be with women of coloured or mixed race. The off- spring of such breeding, whether legitimate or illegitimate, is, from the point of view of efficiency, an acquisition to the community, and, under favourable conditions, an advance on the pure bred African. For noitwithstand- tflg all that it may be possible to adduce in justification of that prejudice against the mixed race, of which I have spoken, and which I have myself fully shared, I am convinced that this class as it at present exists is a valuable and indispensable part of any West Indian community, and tliat a colony of black, coloured, and whites has far more organic efficiency and far more promise in it than a colony of black and white alone. A commu- nity of white and black alone is in far greater danger of remaining, so far as the unofficial classes are concerned, a community of em- ployers and serfs, concessionaires and tribu- taries, with, at best, a bureaucracy to keep the peace between them. The graded mixed 39 class in Jamaica helps to make an organic whole of the community and saves it from this distinct cleavage. A very significant light is thrown on the psychology of colour prejudice in mixed com- munities by the fact that, in the whites, it is stronger against the coloured than against the black. I believe this is chiefly because the coloured intermediate class do form such a bridge as I have described, and undermine, or threaten to undermine, the economic and social ascendancy of the white, hitherto the dominant aristocracy of these communities. This jealousy or indignation is much more pungent than the alleged natural instinct of racial-aversion. The status of such blended communities among human societies may not be high, but the white man has, in fact, created them, and continues to do so, and whatever undesirable characteristics, moral or physical, may be accentuated by interbreeding, it is certain that, from the point of view of social vitality and efficiency, it is not the mixed coloured class, if any, that is decadent in Jamaica. Where, therefore, we have created and are developing a community of diverse races, I cannot, in the light of British West Indian conditions, admit that interbreeding is necess- arily an evil. I think, rather, that where we have such a community we had better make up our mind not only not to despise the off- 40 spring of the illicit interbreeding that invari- ably takes place in such conditions, but to make our account for a certain amount of legitimate and honourable interbreeding, and to look upon it, not as an evil, but as an advantage. ' We need not be much afraid that those persons, the race-purity of whose ' offspring it is essential for the world to main- tain, are going to plunge into a cataract of mixed matrimony. Such a development is I, not at all probable. V. THE TRANSPLANTED AFRICAN. (2). It is obvious from the present state of social relations between white, coloured and black in Jamaica that it is possible for a very much healthier balance of feeling to be arrived at in such a community than has been attained in the United States of America, or in our own South African Colonies. In visits to that country during the last fifteen years, and in talks with Americans in the West Indies, I have constantly been impressed with what, in the light of West Indian experience, have appeared to me exaggerated and ill-founded apprehensions of the dangers and difficulties inherent in a community predominantly com- posed of coloured folk, apprehensions which practically do not affect or disturb us at all. Visitors to Jamaica— British as well as American — discussing with me our conditions there prevailing have asked me how we con- front this or that problem or difficulty con- nected with the intermixture of races which is, or threatens to be, a perplexity in the United States. On such occasions I have 41 42 found myself as a British West In dian u nable to entirely account for an attitude of mind which impressed me as superstitious, if not hysterical, and as indicating misapprehensions of premises very ominous for the United States in the future, but which would appear from the tone of the Southern Press on this subject to be increasingly general in the community in regard to the race question. I was consequently led to examine, in visits to the United States, in what respects the attitude of white towards coloured is differ- ent in our Colonies, and how far such difference of attitude contributes to explain the greater security and promise of mixed society there. Being convinced that industrial harmony between white and dark races may be established more effectually by human understandings and sympathies than by what the sociologists call " economic motive," a fact which, because of the character- istics of the African temperament, is much more saliently true in regard to the confronta- tion of white capital with coloured labour than in purely European communities, I think it important to pursue the question of the moral capacity of the African in the light which is thrown upon it by his position in the United States. I pass over for the present, but shall return to, the charges of the industrial vices of lazi- ness and slovenliness, admitting that there is 43 abundant groxind for these, and also for the charges of thievishness and sexual instability against the normal negro. It may be noted that these charges are made against the African in all parts of the world, even by his most sympathetic critics. On the other hand, very many examples, both in America and the West Indies, have proved that the sons and daughters of the race can transcend these racial propensities. It is abundantly proved that the prejudice which difference of skin and repugnant savage habits have sown, to say nothing of industrial jealousy and the hatred which abides in the injurer against the race he has once oppressed, but now sees free and nominally before the law his equal — cannot be defended by appeal to any insuperable distinction in any category of human quality or capacity : doubt only arises as to whether the exceptional individ- uals who may be chosen for test comparisons are really of unmixed African blood. If so, it is nothing to the point that they are excep- tions : they suffice to disprove the theory of the negrophobist : the theory which, as held in the Southern States of America and in some British Colonies, comes, in substance, to this — that the negro is an inferior order in nature to the white man, in the same sense that the ape may be said to be so. It is really upon this theory that American negrophobia rests, and not upon the viciousness or criminality of the 44 negro. This viciousness and criminality are, in fact, largely invented, imputed, and ex- aggerated, in order to support and justify the propaganda of race exclusiveness. The determined opposition in the United States to the admission of the possibility of " social equality," such a degree of social and professional equality as I have described as established in the West Indies, springs prin- cipally, if not entirely, from two sources, the fear of race mixture by intermarriage, and the fear of industrial competition. The first appears to a stranger to be tlie more active : perhaps because it appeals more to the class who write, or whom he meets in discussion, upon the subject. It is to be feared that if "social equality" is tolerated, the "poor white " man will be attracted to marry the well-to-do coloured young woman; the "poor white " girl the capable and pushing mulatto. No doubt this probability is greater in the United States, where there is a large " poor white " class, than in the West Indies, where there is little of such a class. But, as I have explained, the social and professional equality attained in the West Indies has not yet obliterated race prejudice in regard to marri- age. Nor, where there has been interbreeding, have the effects been at all disastrous to the community, nor, where there has been some evil in it, is the evil uncompensated by distinct advantages. The principal evil, indeed, 45 appears to me to be that the offspring of interbreeding are liable to be despised and insulted and held in indefensible disparage- ment by unintelligent and ill-conditioned white people. It is interesting to note how experience in the West Indies disproves the theory of American negrophobists that the vices which they impute to the negro as justifying their race-persecution are unchangeably inherent in the race. I was in the United States just before the last Presidential election ; and at that time the Southern Press was threatening Mr. Roosevelt that he would lose votes in the South, not only because he had allowed Mr. Booker Washington, the foremost coloured man in the nation, to lunch with him, but because, it was alleged, the effect of a Re- publican administration was to encourage a saucy attitude in the negro, whereas Demo- cracy knew how to keep him in his proper place. On investigating what was meant by a saucy attitude, which editors were not slow quite frankly to explain, it appeared that it meant no more than that the negro was more disposed to assume, under a Republican ad- ministration, that he was to be regarded as just as much a liuman being as the white man, whereas (strange interpretation of the idea of democracy) it was essential that the community should insist upon the fact that his race, or any admixture of such race, ren- 46 ders him essentially and permanently differ- ent, so that he must ever remain a creature bound by nature to pay respect and subservi- ence to white Americans of whatever extrac- tion, no matter what his and their relative qualifications in other categories than those of race may be. Now, it may be that the United States have produced quite a different type of negro or coloured person from what has been produced by the different conditions in Jamaica- Im- pudence — sauciness — is an offensive human quality, to be found in great perfection among the city populations of all white communities. Doubtless, Nature has largely endowed the negro with the faculty of impudence, and it may well be that this faculty is more offen- sively developed by some social conditions than by others. But the phenomenon is not a necessary one. It is not obtrusive in Jamaica. White people there do not suffer from impudence -on the part of black or coloured unless it is provoked by bad manners and unwarrantable pretensions. In the matter of natural good manners and civil disposition the black people of Jamaica are very far, and, indeed, out of comparison, superior to the members of the corresponding class in Eng- land, America, or North Germany. Any man or woman who addresses a native Jamaican with reasonable civility and without condes- cension or arrogance — that is to say, in a 47 rational and proper human manner, will find himself outrun in nine cases out of ten by the natural and kindly courtesy and goodwill of the reply and reception which he will meet with. Yet the Jamaican has enough fundamental independence of spirit to resent an uncivil or overbearing address, and such resentment in the uneducated or uncouth person will natur- ally exhibit itself in impudence or sauciness. In any competition of offensiveness and bad manners the sensitiveness and quick wit of the African tend to give him a decided advan- tage. Excluding such circumstances, the manners, even of the town population, are gentler and more agreeable than those which one is accustomed to meet with in most places of European resort. And, generally, in this matter of courtesy, which is essential to the relation of equality, I should be prepared to maintain that the African is, by the temperament and customs of his race, not inferior but superior to the average Teuton, and I am forced to attribute the " sauciness " complained of in the negro of the Southern States and elsewhere far more to the attitude which has been taken and which is main- tained towards him, than to any inherent fault in his composition. This courtesy of the African races, which is just as much a characteristic part of their " nature " as is their faculty of self-assertion and insolence, is a very valuable social quality, and it is a great loss to any community that such a quality should be destroyed or obscured by social antagonism. The typical and characteristic excess of the negrophobist tendency in the United States is exhibited in the lynching and torturing of coloured persons convicted, accused, or sus- pected of crime : or even on less tangible pretexts or provocations. I do not desire to criticise these extravagances on the score of their special atrocity as methods of social discipline. The normal processes of British criminal law are themselves a nightmare of insane and degrading futility. I am here only concerned with the practice of lynching in regard to its alleged necessity as a terror to coloured oJienders on account of their special propensities. " We must protect our Women " : that is the formula. It is true that the statistics of lynchings show that by far the greatest pro- portion of them follow cases of murder or complicity in murder, and only about 20 per cent, cases of criminal assault or attempts at such assault. This plea, therefore, really covers but a small part of the ground. But as it is the last entrenchment of those who advocate differentiation against the negro, and appeals to the same sentiment as does that argument for social injustice as an anti- dote to the menace of " social equality " with 49 which 1 have dealt above, it is important to examine it in the light of social experience in British West Indian Colonies. Now the fact is that in the British West Indies assaults by black or coloured men on white women or children are practically altogether unknown. No apprehension of them whatever troubles society. I say this as an administrator familiar with the judicial statistics, as a resident familiar with all parts of Jamaica and all classes of its population, as the head of a household of women and girls which have frequented the suburbs of Kingston, and lived for weeks and months in remote country districts with neither myself nor any other white man within call. Any resident in Jamaica will tell the same story. A young white woman can walk alone in the hills or to Kingston, in daylight or dark, through populous settlements of exclusively black or coloured folk, without encountering anything but friendly salutation from man or woman. Single ladies may hire a carriage and drive all over the Island without trouble or molesta- tion. Offences against women and children come into the courts : but they are not against white women and children. Whatever may be the cause, it is the indisputable fact that Jamaica, or any other West Indian Island, is as safe for white women to go about in, if not safer than any European country with which I am acquainted. There have 50 been no savage punishments here, no ter- rorism, no special laws, no illegal discrimina- tions against the coloured. If, then, there is special ground for fearing assaults of this character by coloured on white in America, it clearly cannot possibly be due to any neces- sary or special propensity of race. I cannot but surmise that any propensity there may be to such assaults in the United States is stimulated by the very character of the attitude of the white towards the coloured population. There is maintained a constant storm of suggestion to the most imaginative and uncontrollable of passions in an excitable and imaginative race. If we had anything like the same amount of suggestion abroad in the British West Indies I should fear that we might begin to hear of these criminal assaults in something like the same proportion to other crime as we hear of them in discussions of the colour- difficulty in the United States. When one class makes to another, whose women it has continually made the mothers of its own off- spring, the preposterous and self-damnatory announcement that it is an animal of an inferior order, so soon it not only arouses all the irrepressible self-assertiveness of the human claim to equality, which is as fundamental in the African as in any other race, but also introduces a special prompting to the asser- tion and demonstration of that equality in a category that might otherwise pass as neutral 5I in regard to any such claims. It seems to me, then, that this danger, such as it is, is enor- mously increased, if indeed it is not entirely created, by the extreme race-barrier theory. vi. THE TRANSPLANTED AFRICAN. (3). I BELIEVE that the most important of all factors in bringing about the unpromising distinction of feeling on colour questions observable as between the British West Indies and the United States has been the operation of the American Constitution. The political conditions under which the African stock has had to develop during the last forty years have been quite different in the two countries. Emancipation in the West Indies, moreover, took place thirty years earlier and the modus vivendi which then established itself has had so much longer to produce its more concilia- tory effects. The negroes did not, in our colonies, receive, in fact or in name, direct political power. This was limited by a substantial property test. The industrial and economic results of emancipation in the West Indies were far-reaching, but there was no political revolution, no vast new class of citizens enjoying the franchise and totally un- prepared and imqualified for its responsible or efficient exercise was created. In administra- 52 53 tive matters there was continuity of govern- ment controlled by humane and reasonable principles ; and when the class-partiality of the magistracy in Jamaica produced the so- called "Rebellion" of 1865, the political result was to substitute for an oligarchical constitution the benevolent despotism of Crown Government, which does not acknowledge that the negro, or, indeed, any other class of citizen in a West Indian community, has a natural or indefeasible right to the franchise. It placed responsible power in the hands of the Governor and rendered his administration much more amenable to the control of British public opinion than the administration of a local white oligarchy could be. Since the institution of Crown Government in Jamaica (now modified by an elective element in the Legislature) it may safely be said ' that the black population has had no acute class grievance. The government has been admin- istered with a full regard to its rights and interests, and with just repression of disorderly tendencies. In the United States these conditions have been markedly absent. Political power was conferred on great masses of the emancipated slaves ; their ignorance, their incapacity, their vanity, and their cupidity were appealed to by political adventurers, and the exercise of their political power became necessarily a matter of apprehension to the class hitherto 54 their masters and rulers. The situation was not met, it could not, under the American Constitution, be met in the manner in which it was dealt with in the British Colonies. The political dangers apprehended, and the social irregularities of the coloured population were met and fought by underhand, unjust and violent methods. In politics the constitution was strained and the voting system openly jockeyed and set at nought. In judicial matters resort was had to popular violence and terrorism against the negro. The coloured population there not only has an ostensible grievance, but is continually made to feel that grievance with greater acuteness. The intelli- gence and critical power of the coloured folk advance, and they see the significance of their position more and more clearly. The tend- ency of the Southern Press and of Southern public men is more and more to urge their progressive exclusion from equal consideration in politics or in law. There is in the United States not only a democratic political fran- chise for their National and State Legislatures, but a Civil Service and a Judicial Bench, the appointments to which rest also in theory on the votes of the citizens. We in England consider an elective civil service and an elective judiciary to indicate a mistake in constitution building ; but, it would seem to us a far greater insanity to suppose such arrangements workable in a community iq 55 which the majority of electors are newly-freed plantation negro slaves, or even a population on the level of the average Jamaica peasant. It was natural and practically inevitable that such a situation should be fought as intoler- able by the whites of the South, and that, the American constitution being in fact unwork- able without disaster under such circum- stances, its provisions should have been evaded by methods constitutionally indefensible and unjust. If the same mistake had been made in any British community, similar violence, if not by the same method, would have been done to the constitution. The form of the American constitution, j.sserting full and equal rights of citizenship for all adult males, gives the coloured race a permanent plea of in- justice when those rights are abrogated in practice, and places the white in the permanent false situation of holding by violence and constitutionally unjust expedients a position socially expedient and proved by the history of the West Indies to be favourable to the development of the coloured people. Such a situation is acutely demoralising to white and black alike, and to justify it the minority vilify the character of coloured people, and depreciate their abilities by all kinds of misrepresenta- tions. It not only foments and stimulates the hysteria which finds vent in the exaggerated suggestions of outrageous propensities, in those outbursts of the lust of blood and tor- 56 ture ; it sets up a social terrorism and ob- scurantism within the white class which is spreading as such mob hallucinations tend to spread, into a formula of national patriotism. Just as in this country a few years ago any Englishman or woman who kept a clear head on South African matters was liable to be pelted as a pro-Boer and at best was a legitimate butt for public insult, so in America any person within the colour-belt who ven- tures to attribute human equality to a coloured citizen is promptly dubbed a " negro- philist" (as it were one enamoured of the black man as such), and his arguments are put out of consideration as those of a social out- cast and traitor. The pressure of the terror- ism so exercised by the bullies and cowards who form, in seasons of panic, the articulate majority of every social community, is so great that sane men in America keep silence, or, at best, half-silence, in the face of an in- creasing negrophobia, which is becoming a very threatening national danger. I judge that negrophobia — race prejudice — ipstinctive race prejudice if you will — is, in the United States, the most active source of danger, because I see that, so far as a more wholesome and hopeful equilibrium has been attained in other mixed communities, it has been brought into being by the steadfast exclusion of all theory of race discrimination. Race discrimination — not distinction of 57 human capacity. The civilisation and moral- ity of the Jamaica negro are not high, but he is on a markedly different level from his grandfather, the plantation slave, and his great grandfather, the African savage. The negro in Jamaica has been so far raised, so much freedom of civic mixture between the races has been made tolerable, by the contin- uous application to the race of the theory of humanity and equality : equality, that is, in the essential sense of endowment in the Infinite, a share, however obscure and un- developed, in the inheritance of what we call the Soul. Evangelical Christianity, most democratic of doctrines, and educational effort, inspired and sustained by a personal convic- tion and recognition that, whatever the superficial distinctions, there was fundamental community and an equal claim in the Black with the White to share, according to personal capacity and development, in all the inherit- ance of humanity — these chiefly have created the conditions that have done what has been done for the negro in the lands of his exile. Emancipation, Education, identical justice, perfect equality in the Law Courts and under the Constitution, whatever the law of the constitution might be, these take away the sting of race difference, and if there is race inferiority, it is not burdened with an artificial handicap. Negroes are now indisputably the equals of the white men in 58 categories in which one hundred years ago their masters would have confidently argued that they were naturally incapable of attaining equality. All such positive and materialised progress has been made by ignoring the ob- vious ; by refusing to accept as conclusive the differences and the disabilities ; by believing in the identities, the flashes of response and promise ; by willing that there should be light where there seemed to be no light; by the methods of the visionary whose king- dom is not of this world, but who is insensately bent on assimilating this worldto that kingdom; — in part even by less than this, by the mere resolute maintenance in the State of principles of common justice. The vast transplantation of slavery, the intercourse of white and black, have, in fact, brought advance in humanity to the coloured people. This has been done, and done only, and further advance towards health in a mixed community can only be looked for by adherence to the attitude, nay, indeed, by the personal recognition and consciousness of equality. Whatever mob prejudices may dictate, statesmen and educated observers at least cannot fail to recognise this, and must recognise that to set up the opposite principle, the allegation of inequality, of insuperable race differences and degradation, and to take this as a guide for internal policy, is a sin against light that is certain to aggravate the disorders of any mixed community as it is to 59 day demoralising tlie Southern States of the Union. The colour line is not a rational line, the logic neither of words nor facts will uphold it. If adopted it infallibly aggravates the virus of the colour problem. The more it is ignored, the more is that virus attenuated. It is quite possible to justify a political generalisation — not as a truth, but as a work- ing formula — that where the majority of the population nre negro peasants, it is advisable to restrict the franchise. It is not possible, either as a working political formula, or as an anthropological theorem, to justify a generalisation that there is any political or human function for which coloured persons are by their African blood disqualified. In various categories of human activity one may maintain that, as a rule, black and coloured folk are not up to the normal standard of white, and are difficult and disheartening to deal with. But in other categories they are more liberally endowed than the average white man, not only with sympathetic and valuable human qualities, but with talent and executive ability for their expression. My study and comparison of conditions in the United States and in the West Indies has brought me to the conviction that no solution of the American colour difficulties will be found except by resolutely turning the back to the colour-line and race-difEereijtiation theory. American and Colonial politicians and public men are not Exeter Hall Aboli- tionists, nor Evangelical Christian mis- sionaries. I do not prescribe the formulas and methods of any such sects as a remedy. But it cannot be ignored that it happened that the religious formulas of the men who laid the foundations for a peaceful develop- ment of the mixed community of Jamaica were democratic and humanitarian. No more than this is required in regard to tempera- mental attitude. Where the race-difEerentia- tion formula is held to it will doubtless in time bring about civil war. If statesmen and citizens face in the contrary direction I do not say they will immediately attain civil peace, but I am confident that they will be travelling the only road towards it. VII. AMERICAN CORROBORATIONS. The substance of the preceding three chapters, in which I have compared racial relations in Jamaica with those prevailing in the United States was published, with some additional commentary, in an American Review in April, 1905. The statements made as to the superior results attained in the British Colony were such as American citizens might reasonably have been expected to receive with some scepticism. The facts are so important that I am glad to be able to substantiate my own impressions by quoting those of two well- known American writers who have, since my observations appeared, quite independently but very precisely endorsed them. Mrs. Ella Wheeler Wilcox, writing from Jamaica (which this lady has visited several times) to the New York American, in January, 1906, speaks as follows : — " The man or woman who visits Jamaica and does not acknowledge the ability of the coloured race to occupy positions of dignity and trust, and to acquire education and culture, is either blind or utterly pig-headed. " Three coloured men acted on the jury in 61 62 Kingston this week. The policemen, the trolley and railway officials are coloured ; so are the post office officials. Scores of men stamped with the indelible marks of the African occupy prominent places in large industrial concerns, and the most remarkable man teacher I ever met with is Mr. of , Principal of the Schools, and a man of very dark, albeit of very handsome, features. " There is no question but the coloured man is more evenly developed and better treated, better understood on this island than anywhere in America. " Nowhere has the man with coloured blood in his veins a better opportunity to rise in the world than right here. Stay here— and prove to all " doubting Thomases " what the coloured race can do. It is miraculous to think what it has accomplished here in sixty- eight years, since slavery was abolished. " What may it not achieve in the next half century ? " Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard Univer- sity, in an otherwise notable article on " Race Questions and Prejudices," published in. the " International Journal of Ethics " for April, rgoS, from which I am fain to quote again hereafter in support of the views of these questions which experience has impressed up- on myself, has written at some length on the 63 topics which I have discussed in these chap- ters on "The Transplanted African." His testimony is so explicit and coming indepen- dently from such a source so significant and so weighty, that I think it necessary to quote the following somewhat lengthy extract with only trifling excisions. "How can the white man and the negro, once forced, as they are in our South, to live side by side, best learn to live with a minimum of friction, with a maximum of co-operation ? I have long learned from my Southern friends that this end can only be attained by a firm, and by a very constant and explicit insistence upon keeping the negro in his proper place, as a social inferior — who, then, as an inferior, should, of course, be treated humanely, but who must first be clearly and unmistakably taught where he belongs. I have observed that the pedagogical methods which my Southern friends of late years have found it their duty to use, to this end, are methods such as still keep awake a good deal of very lively and intense irritation, in the minds not only of the pupils but also of the teachers. "Must such increase of race-hatred first come, in order that later, whenever the negro has fully learned his lesson, and aspires no more beyond his station, peace may later come? Well, concerning just this matter I lately learned what was to me, in my experience, a new lesson. I have had occasion three times, 64 in recent summers, to visit British West Indies, Jamaica and Trinidad, at a time when few tourists were there. Upon visiting Jamaica I first went round the coast of the island, visiting its various ports. I then went inland, and walked for miles over its admirable country roads. I discussed its condition with men of various occupations. I read some of its official literature. 1 then consulted with a new interest its history. I watched its negroes in various places, and talked with some of them, too. 1 have since collected such further information as I had time to collect regarding its life, as various authorities have discussed the topic, and this is the result : "Jamaica has a population of surely not more than 14,000 or 15,000 whites, mostly English. Its black population considerably exceeds 600,000. Its mulatto population, of various shades, numbers, at the very least, some 40,000 or 50,000. Its plantation life, in the days before emancipation, was much sadder and severer, by common account, than ours in the South ever was. Both the period of emancipa- tion and the immediately following period were of a very discouraging type. In the sixties of the last century there was one very unfortunate insurrection. The economic his- tory of the island has also been in many ways unlucky even to the present day. Here, then, are certainly conditions which in some respects are decidedly such as would seem to tend 65 towards a lasting state of general irritation, such as would make, you might suppose, race- questions acute. Moreover, the population, being a tropical one, has serious moral burdens to contend with of the sort that result from the koown influences of such climates upon human character in the men of all races. " And yet, despite all these disadvantages, to-day, whatever the problems of Jamaica, whatever its defects, our own present Southern race-problem in the forms which we know best, simply does not exist. There is no public controversy about social race equality or superiority. Neither a white man nor a white woman feels insecure in moving about freely amongst the black population anywhere on the island. "Thenegrois, on the whole, neitherpainfuUy obtrusive in his public manners, nor in need of being sharply kept in his place. Within the circles of the black population itself there is meanwhile a decidedly rich social differen- tiation. There are negroes in government service, negroes in the professions, negroes who are fairly prosperous peasant proprietors, and there are also the poor peasants; there are the thriftless, the poor in the towns, — yes, as in any tropical country, the beggars. In Kingston and in some other towns there is a small class of negroes who are distinctly criminal. On the whole, however, the negro and coloured population, taken in the mass, are 66 orderly, law-abiding, contented, still backward in their education, but apparently advancing. They are generally loyal to the government. The best of them are aspiring, in their own way, and wholesomely self-conscious. Yet there is no doubt whatever that English white men are the essential controllers of the destiny of the country. But these English whites, few as they are, control the country at present with extraordinary little friction, and wholly without those painful emotions, those insistent complaints and anxieties, which at present are so prominent in the minds of many of our own Southern brethren. Life in Jamaica is not ideal. The economical aspect of the island is in many ways unsatisfactory. But the negro race-question, in our present American sense of that term, seems to be substantially solved. " I answer, by the simplest means in the world — the simplest, that is, for Englishmen — ^viz. : by English administration, and by English reticence. When once the sad period of emancipation and of subsequent occasional disorder was passed, the Englishman did in Jamaica what he had so often and so well done elsewhere. He organized his colony ; he established good local courts, which gained by square treatment the confidence of the blacks. The judges of such courts were Englishmen. The English ruler also provided a good country constabulary, in which native 67 blacks also fomid service, and in which they could exercise authority over other blacks. Black men, in other words, were trained, under English management, of course, to police black men. A sound civil service was also organized ; and in that educated negroes found in due time their place, while the chief of each branch of the service were or are, in the main, Englishmen. The excise and the health services, both of which are very highly developed, have brought the law near to the life of the humblest negro, in ways which he sometimes finds, of course restraining, but which he also frequently finds beneficent Hence he is accustomed to the law ; he sees its ministers often, and often, too, as men of his own race ; and in the main, he is fond of order, and to be respectful towards the established ways of society. The Jamaica negro is described by those who know him as especially fond of bringing his petty quarrels and per- sonal grievances into court. He is litigious just as he is vivacious. But this confidence in the law is just what the courts have encour- aged. That is one way, in fact, to deal with the too forward and strident negro. Encourage him to air his grievances in court, listen to him patiently, and fine him when he deserve fines. That is a truly English type of social pedagogy. It works in the direction of making the negro a conscious helper toward good social order. 68 " Administration, I say, has done the larger half of the work of solving Jamaica's race- problem. Administration has filled the island with good roads, has reduced to a minimum the tropical diseases by means of an excellent health-service, has taught the population loyalty and order, has led them some steps already on the long road " up from slavery," has given them, in many cases, the true self- respect of those who themselves officially co-operate in the work of the law, and it has done this without any such result as our Southern friends nowadays conceive when they think of what is called "negro domination." Administration has allayed ancient irritations. It has gone far to offset the serious economic and tropical troubles from which Jamaica meanwhile suffers. " Yes, the work has been done by administra- tion, — and by reticence. You well know that in dealing, as an individual, with other indi- viduals, trouble is seldom made by the fact that you are actually the superior of another man in any respect. The trouble conies when you tell the other man too stridently that y(ju are his superior. Be my superior quietly, simply showing your superiority in your deeds, and very likely I shall love you for the very fact of your superiority. For we all love our leaders. But tell me that I am your inferior, and then perhaps I may grow boyish, and may throw stones. Well, it is so with 69 races. Grant then that yours is the superior race. Then you can afford to say little about that subject in your public dealings with the backward race. Superiority is best shown by good deeds and by few boasts. " So much for the lesson that Jamaica has suggested to me. The widely different condi- tions of Trinidad suggest, despite the differ- ences, a somewhat similar lesson. Here also there are great defects in the social order ; but again, our Southern race problem does not exist. When, with such lessons in mind, I recall our problem, as I hear it from my brethren of certain regions of our Union, I see how easily we can all mistake for a permanent race-problem a difficulty that is essentially a problem of quite another sort. Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in his recent book on the " Southerners' Problem," speaks in one notable passage of the possibility, which he calls Utopian, that perhaps some day the negro in the South may be made to co-operate in the keeping of order by the organization under State control of a police of their own race, who shall deal with blacks. He even mentions that the English in the East Indies use native constabulary. But this possibility is not Utopian. When now I hear the complaint of the Southerner, that the race-problem is such as constantly to endanger the safety of his home, I now feel disposed to say : " The problem that endangers the sanctity of your 10 homes and that is said sometimes to make lynching a necessity, is not a race-problem. It is an administrative problem. You have never organized a country constabulary. Hence when various social conditions, amongst which the habit of irritating public speech about race-questions is indeed one, though only one condition, have tended to the pro- ducing, and to the arousing of extremely dangerous criminals in your communities, you have no adequate means of guarding against the danger. When you complain that such criminals, when they flee from justice, get sympathy from some portion of their ignorant fellows and so are aided to get away, you forget that you have not.first made your negro countrymen familiar with and fond of the law, by means of a vigorous and well-organized and generally beneficent administration con- stantly before his eyes, not only in the pursuit of criminals, but in the whole care of public order and health. If you insist that in some districts the white population is too sparse or too poor, or both, to furnish an efficient country constabulary constantly on duty, why, then, have you not long since trained black men to police black men ? Sympathy with the law grows with responsibility for its administration. If it is revolting to you to see black men possessed of the authority of a country constabulary, still, if you will, you can limit their authority to i control over 71 their own race. If you say all this speech of mine is professorial, unpractical, Utopian, and if you still cry out bitterly for the effective protection of your womankind, I reply merely, look at Jamaica. Look at other English colonies. " In any case, the Southern race problem will never be relieved by speech or by practices such as increase irritation. It will be relieved when administration grows sufficiently effec- tive, and when the negroes themselves get an increasingly responsible part in this adminis- tration in so far as it relates to their own race. That may seem a wild scheme. But I insist : It is the English way. Look at Jamaica, and learn how to protect your own homes." VIII. THE IDLENESS OF THE AFRICAN. He is the dog, She is the cat, and They, at afternoon tea discussions in England, are the servants. In our tropical dependencies They are the "niggers." And much the same mental attitude towards these two Theys is recognisable. So it must be whenever any class of human beings is criticised by the standard of servile virtues. The virtue of the slave is to be industrious for the profit of his master. If such industry is not manifested, then he is idle. The African knows better than any other race what slavery is. It has been a universal institution of his native communities, and his closest and longest apprenticeship to civilisation was slavery under white kidnappers. To the African who, in his own person, or those of his fathers, has passed through that apprenticeship, the fact most alive in his consciousness in relation to white men is that he is not a slave. Remem- ber, not only was it the white men who have made his slavery bitterest, it was they also who, for a century, were his emancipators ; it was they who promised him that slavery should be done away. Mere contact with the 72 73 white man in the countries where he has been his slave continually reminds him of this. He guards himself, therefore, against all that he thinks savours of slavery with a constant jealousy; he resents the unwarrant- able claims which the unlicked cubs of a class-civilisation habitually make on the members of a subordinate class, and perhaps it may be said that he gives the white man credit, often, for not expecting things of him which the latter may be prone to think he has a right to expect of the darkie, but which he would certainly not expect of men of his own race or class. The African, as I have said above, is very quick in his appreciation of such an attitude, and has very little con- sideration for its sensibilities. But, it will be said, no one demands of him servile virtues ; we only demand of him the industrial virtues of the free Englishman. Well, then, let us put aside all suggestion that servile virtues are demanded of the African by the European adventurer, mer- chant planter, or Government officer ; let us eliminate, too, any disturbing suspicion that we may ever demand servile virtues of the free wage-worker at home. What is the standard of industrial virtue in that wage- worker with which the behaviour of the African compares so distressingly? To put it most simply : first, it is the habit of the European workman (we may leave out of 74 consideration all other classes) of working six days (at least) out of every seven, and work- ing for practically the whole of each such day. And, secondly, it is the habit of the European workman of working with a certain sense of obligation to give fair work for his wage. I do not say this latter habit is so gen- erally conspicuous as the other. Indeed, the same persons who most loudly accuse the African of idleness in his own countries, most loudly inveigh at home against the shirking of the British workman. But in the Tropics • they compare his industrial conscientiousness most favourably with that of the black, so that we may take it that this form of indus- trial virtue is to be acknowledged as imput- able to him. It may perhaps be the fact that the condi- tions of industrial civilisation, persisting through generations, have established a certain conscientiousness of workmanship as an instinctive habit, even where the worker has no personal or sympathetic interest in the output. If not innate and instinctive it is early developed by the induction of the con- tinuous habit of mechanical toil which dominates the life of the civilised proletariat. This conscience, however acquired by the workman, is by no means entirely the fear of losing his job. I need not expatiate here on the horrors reflected in this industrial instinct. I have only to point out that the criticism 75 which condemns the African by this standard habitually assumes that the continuous toil of the European wage-earner is an excellent and beneficent thing, and that the hideous perversion of human impulse that can make a man enjoy his work irrespectively of any beauty or significance in it is an admirable product of evolution. The African is con- demned because he is deficient in these two habits. It is a fact that he does not recognise them as virtues. Let that be admitted and well understood, and the reasons why he does not, and we shall be on the way to understand much better than do some of his censors what manner of admissible virtues he has from the point of view of the requirements of the society he has to live in. In the first place, the European workman works six days a week, and if his conditions are fortunate, nine hours a day (the average, more) not primarily from virtue, but from necessity. If he could support himself and his family on a little less toil, I don't think even the most hide-bound of industrial moral- ists would condemn him for doing so. The European works excessively because, under the present organisation of production and of the distribution of products, he must do so or starve. If he cannot keep up the pace of the speeded machine, he drops out altogether. The African, working primarily for precisely the same motives of necessity, and not from 76 industrial virtue, works very much less because so much less toil will give him what he wants. Moreover his industry is desultory, he seems to have no feeling of the excellence and efficiency of continuity, of the claims of a job over the attractions of any passing whim. We must remember that a great part of the white man's work-time is occupied in providing for the needs of other people who do not work- through the tolls of rent, interest, and profits. This part is mere slavery, and the sphere of those servile virtues alone with which, as agreed, we have not to deal. His industrial merit can hardly be said to extend beyond the work that he does for his own support and profit, for surely that is all that he does of his own free will. The rest is by compulsion of the industrial machine. If the work he does for himself is more than the African's it is simply because the white man's needs are more, and this may be a fair standard for criticism. It may be held that the wider needs of the European do entitle him to be considered a superior man. But if the test of virtue is willingness to work for the satisfac- tion of needs, then I cannot myself impute greater virtues to the European, for it is un- deniable that when he feels the motive suf- ficient the x\frican is a magnificent worker. The total output of social utility produced by the civilised worker is very much greater on the average than that of the African, but 77 the latter is not trained nor disposed to the production of surplus-value, he does not care to produce, and his circumstances do not compel him to produce much more than is required for his own maintenance ; and if this is little, and cannot, in his condition of in- dustrial anarchy, be very greatly increased, so that what he retains for himself is less than what the workman gets, yet it is arguable that he gets much more enjoyment of life and satisfaction out of that little than the civilised wage earner can get out of his more elaborate pittance. And all the excess over this of the latter's output is merely servile labour. The reason why the African, whether at home or in the West Indies, does not have to work very hard to satisfy his needs, is that those needs are few and simple, the soil and climate generous in the production of food, and land not monopolised. Where land is monopolised he has to work harder, and in some cases even to work as regularly as the European. Moreover there is a tendency, I think, to exaggerate the spontaneous fertility of tropical lands. Enthusiastic visitors to the West Indies are constantly amazed at the in- efficiency which fails to produce universal opulence in a country where " anything will grow." Such visitors sometimes take up estates, in order to show the indolent Creole what British energy can make of his neglected inheritance. They presently discover that 78 anything, indeed, will grow, provided the rains do not fail ; and especially " bush " and weeds, which they have to clean out continu- ally if they are to get any crops, also cater- pillars, and scale insects, and cotton worms, and other competing forms of life in great abundance. In short, that the immediate and intelligent application of labour is con- stantly necessary ; and even for a black man, under a tropical sun, hard labour is not always inviting. But we have to consider the further fault alleged against the African that when work- ing for wages he has no industrial probity. Just as — because need and the industrial servitude of civilised proletariats have never drilled him into their mechanical habits of labour — he has no instinct of working continu- ously or automatically, so he has had nothing to produce in him the industrial conscience that calls on the worker to give " fair " work for "fair" pay. With him, through all the history of his race, work for a master has been work under the necessity of slavery, his free activity has been either co-operative, family, or communal work, or work on his own little farm-patch ; or, where any question of inter- change came in, the activity of trade and barter. The African is a born trader. The character of the Kaffir bargain is proverbial. The virtue of the Trader is to get much for little : his motto is " Caveat Emptor." Wage 79 bargaining and the fulfilment of wage con- tracts was a new thing to the emancipated slave ; the joy of getting the best of a bargain was ingrained and ineradicable. That is the morality which he applies to a wage-bargain. He has small sense of obligation in regard to it. And here we come across one of the reasons for that frequent assertion that the African was a better industrial citizen under slavery than as a wage-worker. It is not entirely the chagrined complaint of the disappointed exploiter. The African was accustomed to the status and obligations of slavery, and whilst it is true that the status and obligations of plantation slavery were much crueller and less tempered by human and domestic re- lations than the slavery of his native societies, yet even on the plantation he was confronted with the white man in categories with which he was familiar ; the category of force, which he recognised and respected, and the category of affection, particularly family affection, so that the slave regarded himself as a member of his owner's family, and truly was so in essential relations far more than any wage-em- ployee in modem European society comes near to being. Therefore, he worked well: not only from fear of the force, but for the same reason as his fathers worked — whether as slaves or free men in their native families — that is, from social or conventional, not from pecuniary obligation. When he was removed from the sanction of force by emancipation, and from that of affection and habit by the substitution of wage labour, he naturally became from the point of view of the employer who judged him solely as an investment of wages, a very idle and conscienceless person. As I have pointed out, in discussing race- antagonisms, the employer, especially the new-comer, the Scottish overseer, who, as attorney, superseded " Old Massa " in the management of so many West Indian estates, judged him only by those parts of his char- acter affecting the matters in which they had common contact, and troubled himself not at all to do justice to the rest. And yet it is a commonplace in the West Indies, and in all countries where the idleness and untrust- worthiness of the African are complained of, that under personal influence he is a capital worker. Some estates will have constant labour difficulties, others hardly any, the whole i difference being due to the temperament and intelligence of the employer and his overseers. Even under these best of conditions, how- ever, in colonies where the negro is under no compulsion of need to work regularly, labour difficulties will arise. For the free West Indian negro is not only averse as a matter of dignity to conducting himself as if he were a plantation slave, and bound to work every day, but also enjoys the fun of feeling himself a master. And so, on a big sugar estate, when expensive machinery is running, and the crop has to be worked without stoppage, or on a banana plantation, when the steamer has been telephoned at daybreak, and two or three thousand bunches have to be at the wharf by noon, the negro hands will very likely find it impossible to cut canes or fruit that morning. It isn't a strike for better conditions of labour : they may have no grievance; another day they will turn up all right : but a big concern cannot be run on that basis. That is the root of the demand for indentured labour in the West Indies. It is dearer than Creole labour, but it is at hand, and can be set to work when required. The indentured Indians do not compete with the negro to his ex- clusion, they literally maintain the oppor- tunity for his employment. In Jamaica wages are highest in those districts where indentured coolies are employed on banana plantations. This does not mean that coolies are employed because higher wages would otherwise have to be paid to Creole labourers. It means that a valuable productive industry can be main- tained by the organised and manageable coolie labour, which, so established, can employ and pay good wages to the casual Creole labourer, but which, if it had only that casual and independent labour to rely on, could not be established and carried on at all. And the same is the case with regard to the large Demerara and Trinidad sugar estates F 82 that employ indentured labour. The African, where his inclination is involved, is finely irresponsive to merely economic considera- tions. It is no use raising his wages to in- duce him to work four days in the week on an estate instead of three. The probable effect will be to make him work two, seeing that two days of the higher rate will give him all the cash he proposes to hire for. The rest of his time he finds more valuable to himself in other employment. The idleness of the African resolves itself, as I have observed him in the West Indies, into this : he has no mechanical habit of in- dustry. He has no idea of any obligation to be industrious for industry's sake, no concep- tion of any essential dignity in labour itself, no delight in gratuitous toil. Moreover, he has never been imbued with the vulgar and fallacious illusion which is so ingrained in competitive industrial societies, that service can be valued in money. The worker in such countries constantly claims that his work is " worth " so much. We know that its " worth '' is simply what the worker is strong enough in competition to get for it, and that much of the poorest paid work is in truth the most valuable. But work and money are not yet rigidly commensurable in the conscious- ness of the African. Half a dollar may be worth one day's work to him, a second half- dollar may be worth a second day's work, but ^3 a third half-dollar will not be worth a third day's work. A third day's work may seem to him worth two dollars. It is this incommen- surability of work with money in his mind (a most valuable and hopeful characteristic) that partly accounts for his apparent lack of conscience towards his employer. Moreover he lives in climates where toil is exhausting, and rest both easy and sweet. There are few days in the year in England when it is really pleasant to loaf, and the streets of civilised cities are not tempting to recumbent medita- tion. These are his deficiencies, judged from the point of view of the European who wants to make use of his labour. From a different point of view, the viciousness of his habits is not so conspicuous. The African is for the most part an unskilled labourer, but he is strong, and when he is pleased to work he is highly efficient within the limits of his skill. He works best in gangs imder social impulse, he works with extreme industry on his own small hold- ing, up to the limit of his limited wants. There are no boxmds to the trouble he will take in service in which his goodwill or affec- tion is engaged. The capitalist system of industry has not disciplined him into a wage- slave, and I doubt if it ever will. I think it quite probable that that system, in its attempt to incorporate the African in its wage prole- tariat, may, after all, break down. The 84 European wage proletariat and its standards of industrial virtue were only created by long evolution arising out of private landlordism and the pressure of climate and poverty. So long as the African has access to the land, and is saved from poverty by the simplicity of his needs and the ease of meeting them, so long the capitalist employer is sure to find his labour unmanageable under the " free" wage system. From this fact has arisen the demand for indentured labour, established now for long in the West Indies, and already found essential in South Africa and elsewhere on that continent as a sine qui non of the exploitation of largely capitalised enterprises. IX. BLACK LABOUR IN SOUTH AFRICA. What I have written so far lias related especially to the Negro division of the African populations, studied as labourers in the West Indies and the New World, whither they have been transplanted by the white man to work for his profit. South Africa is peopled pre- dominantly by the Bantu race, different in many characteristics from the Negro, and in some respects, especially in military qualities, more advanced. Moreover, whilst many of the West African negroid peoples have an inter- mixture of Aryan or Semitic blood, this is the case with almost the whole of the Basuto people : a fact to be borne in mind when theories of insuperable race distinctions are being propounded. Notwithstanding the differ- ences of conditions between South Africa and the New World, and of racial characteristics between the Bantu and the negro, what has been said with regard to the latter in industry is substantially true also of the former. For an intelligent and sympathetic, though not completely perspicuous study of the South African Kaffir (we need not occupy ourselves with the Hottentots and the almost extinc 85 86 Bushman) I would refer to Mr. D. Kidd's book, " The Essential Kaffir." The report of the recent South African Native Affairs Commis- sion, presented to Parliament in April, 1905, is the most important and instructive official document recently published on the subject. The industrial temperament and habits which are imputed to the black man as racial are everywhere the reflex of the conditions of terrestrial, climatic and social environment in which the black man has lived and thriven, and when the race is transplanted they are perceptibly modified, in detail, whilst natur- ally, in tropical countries, remaining for the most part the same in general character. The factors of the inter-racial industrial situation in South Africa are complicated by the im- perfect stability of the political settlement of the country, as exemplified in the recent native troubles in Natal. I desire to confine my observations as closely as possible to the industrial aspect, which, however, it is im- possible to regard as entirely independent of the political. We hear,therefore,much the same complaints from employers in South Africa as in the West Indies of the idleness of the black man, and they rest upon precisely the same foundation. The soil and climate of South Africa are not indeed so directly fertile as those of the West Indies, and the South African tribes have had ]tjot only to exercise greater industry ai)d ix\- 87 vention in their bodily maintenance than the West Indian peasant, but have also had until recently to maintain the activities of tribal warfare. The KafErs, besides being agri- culturists in a certain degree, are also nations of herdsmen, and understand the management of cattle, which the West Indian negro, and, for the most part, the West African tribes he sprang from, do not. It may probably be concluded that the native populations of South Africa are, by the common necessities of their tribal life, more industrious as a rule than the negroes of the forest regions and coast of Africa or the transplanted African. The Commissioners to whose report on South African Native Affairs I have referred, summarise as follows their conclusions on this side of the matter : — § 372. — " The Natives have had access to the land on terms which have enabled them to regard work for wages as a mere supplement to their means, and not as it is regarded in the older communities, namely, as the urgent condition under which the majority of mankind earn their bread. § 373- — "The theory that the South African Natives are hopelessly indolent maybe dismissed as not being in accordance \i