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 on his importation and for the provision of house-room and other accommodation for him. A civilised and humane State takes care that where this system exists sufficient safe- guards are framed against oppression and ill- treatment of indentured labour, by the pro- vision of inspectors and the prosecution of offending employers, just as it takes similar care, by factory laws and inspection at home, for the decent conduct of capitalist enterprise under what is called the free wage system, and as it regulates the contracts and treatment of seamen, who have to serve in conditions very much less free than those of a coolie on a West Indian sugar estate. If we carefully compare the essentials of the situation as between a modern industrial community and a tropical dependency, where white enterprise is exploiting native resources, we shall, I believe, be forced to recognise that inhuman social conditions arise in them much more out of the opposition in the categories of Capital and Labour than out of the opposition in the category of race or colour. By inhuman social conditions I mean oppression by the employer and disloyalty in the employee, with the corresponding antagonism, aversion, and mutual disaffection between classes in one commonwealth. I have remarked that no human being voluntarily submits himself to the condi- 123 tions habitually required by developed cap- italist enterprise of the workers for whose service it calls. This is a truism. The tropical native is not under such compulsion, so the capitalist has to go where poverty, as in India and China, has placed the common man under the same necessity as he is in this country. Necessity more stringent, no doubt, as is requisite to induce him to accept exile, but necessity the same in kind. The servile conditions of factory and sweating-shop in- dustry have only been abated with us by generations of ordered industrial warfare, in which thousands of the workers have perished, and by a century of legislative effort, still far from the attainment of its programme. Wherever we have organised capital employing masses of workers, there, unless we have the control and vigilant intervention of the State, together with completely efficient trade unions — there inevitably we shall have servile conditions imposed on the workers. One true moral of the recent inflamed con- troversy as to the " servility " of indentured labour, Chinese or other, is that wherever the industrial form of capitalist production is set up and economic necessities only are regarded, there will arise conditions which all who have the instinct of liberty will denounce as servile. But if any who have spoken of " Chinese slavery " have forgotten the cruel compulsions and humiliations abounding in the life of the 124 European worker, then justly may they be charged with superstition and exaggeration. The indentured Indian coolie in British Guiana or Trinidad is, in regard to the satis- faction of his desires and the attainment of comfort, much better off than the average European unskilled worker, but he would not be so if he were not protected. It has often been pointed out that comfort is one thing and freedom another, but less often that there are varying social standards of judgment as to what constitutes freedom : and it is notable that the West Indian negro thinks the coolie more of a slave than we do. That is because the economic conditions of his life are freer than those of our proletariat who take them- selves, as a rule, as the type of free men, and his standard of independence so much the higher. He would quite understand why the Socialist calls our freedom " wage-slavery." The protection by the State of indentured labour in our Colonies is not a democratic domestic compulsion, as is our own industrial legislation : it is a paternal and humanitarian compulsion. It is imposed from without by the statesmanship of the Indian and British Governments. Without going so far as to suggest that in the absence of these external authorities the condition of indentured labourers in the West Indies would be as bad as it is on Portuguese plantations in Africa (since the English temperament may well be 125 more humane than the Portuguese), we may be quite certain that were this compulsion absent there would be much oppression and cruelty to indentured coolies. So it has been, and so it would be again. There is in such communities neither the humane public opinion nor the democratic self-interest and organised power to check it. XII. THE INDUSTRIAL FACTOR IN RACE PREJUDICE. It is a deplorable but unquestionable fact of experience, and it is the basis of prac- tical democratic conviction in politics and industry, that if you give one average man command over the services of another for his own purposes, he will abuse it. The matter is not disposed of by protesting that our countrymen in the colonies are as humane as ourselves. For the most part indeed, it is positively not the fact that the men who find their place in the colonies as overseers or foremen of native labour are as humane as the average of British public sen- timent ; it would be illusory to pretend that they are so, and they certainly do not as a class claim any such quality, rather shunning the im- putation of squeamishness. And in the popula- tion of a new exploiting settlement, such diamonds of the rougher type predominate. Even in a democratic white commimity— the United States— the attitude of Capital to Labour, determined only by economic motive, is perfectly ruthless. Nothing is gained by pretending that a labour-driver is more con- 126 127 siderate when he is dealing with black men : on the contrary, the danger of inhumanity is much greater where there is racial distinction, because this, at best, obscures the human sense of sympathy : but where this obscuration is enhanced by a positive theory of racial incompatibility and inferiority, race prejudice intensifies the tendency to oppression in exploitation. The social claims that are recognised in the fellow white man are expressly denied to exist at all in the black. That this theory is prevalent, if not absolutely predominant in the industrial communities that are springing up on a basis of coloured labour no honest and well informed observer will for a moment deny. It is preached as an axiom of public policy in America and in South Africa that the safety of the State depends upon the maintenance of this doctrine. The distinction in sensibility, in industrial standard, between an alien race and the white, is deemed, by such an authority as Lord Milner, a Providential dispensation. Such a doctrine reacts upon the temper of the employer in industry, and on his conception of suitable methods for dealing with coloured workmen ; but that the doctrine is itself rather a product of the industrial relation than a cause of its deficiency in humanity is, I think, evident from a consideration of the enormous degree to which this attitude of mind has gained ground during the recent 128 extension of capitalistic industrial enterprise in the territories of coloured proletariats. Colour prejudice has increased of late years in the Southern States of America. This is not entirely because of the development of capital- ist manufacturing industry in the South during the same period, but it is largely so beyond question. Industrial jealousy has been stimu- lated by the competition between white and black labour, it has called in colour prejudice to its aid, as it has been called in in politics ; and the white men's unions are determined to exclude black labour from the factories. When self-interest impels one class or race of men to do injustice to another they will find a moral or religious excuse for it, and I have shown how this affects colour prejudice in America. In Africa the coincidence is more marked. The development in the Congo State, where the native is denied any kind of human right, is purely and directly the expression of exploiting greed. The most prolonged and intimate contact of white men with Africans has been that of missionaries who took with them, and have seen no reason to abandon, the conviction of the ultimate equal humanity of the races, expressed in the formula of brotherhood through a common Father. But when it became possible for white men to get into industrial relations with the same natives, the theory changed, the secular creed asserted tig itself, and the time-honoured theory in the faith of which chattel slavery was abolished becomes a laughing stock. The sentiment that the black man is " only fit for slavery" is heard quite frequently now ; it has become common within our own memory. It is ^ notable that in a country like Nigeria, where there has as yet been no invasion of capital seeking labour for direct employment, and where our administration is quasi-military, we are still priding ourselves on putting the old British theory into practice, and are destroying slavery. We still base our claims to be there on our practical propaganda of freedom. But where that imported demand for productive labour, of which I have spoken above, is becoming the paramount influence in the community, the tendency of all political theory is the reverse. The " Negrophilist," to use that question- begging term which in such countries comes to carry so much odium and disparagement, is one whose judgment is not yet distorted by the influence of the economic demands of the capitalist industrial system. His most common type has been the Evangelical missionary, but he is common enough in all classes where there is no perverting interest to prejudice him towards material compulsion on the native. The negrophilist missionary does not con- sider the black man has nothing to learn from the white : he considers that he has a great 13° deal to learn, and that much of his nature is still exceedingly bestial in departments in which evolution has refined and improved the white. But he cannot accept the superficial deductions which race-antagonism makes from these differences. All over the world, where white men have mixed with coloured, you will find very many filled with acute racial pre- judice. It is marked in many Anglo-Indians. But in the same places you will find men who feel that the race distinctions are superficial, and so far from being final and insuperable, are really, compared with the dominant facts, unimportant. These men have made personal friends with persons of the alien race, and they know that such friendship is of precisely the same quality as is their friendship for men and women of their own race, or for men and women of France, Germany, or any other nation that may have been from time to time patriotically regarded as the natural foe of their country. But this appreciation of equality is attained in a totally different region of human relations from that of economic self-interest, and the man who comes in contact with other races under the stimulus of economic motive is not favourably adjusted to discover it. Quite the reverse. In the simplest form of such meeting he lands in the alien's covmtry and has to fight for life before he can even think of peaceably producing his own living, much less of getting the alien to 131 help him to do it. In South'Africa he has even had in some instances to defend his own prior settlement against invading ^and multiplying hordes of warlike Kaffirs. We must recognise thatthe contacts of human races seeking subsist- ence haiVe always for the most part begun with war, and that if we are hostile to any Europ- ean nation to-day it is chiefly from economic jealousy. And even of those that assert the inferiority of the alien it must be admitted that many assert an essential human equality, only they allege the necessity of disciplining the inferior by a process that involves the practical negation of it. XIII. THE MISSIONARY PLEA. There are two motives which bring the white man into contact with coloured races ; and though one is much more conspicuously operative than the other they are so essentially distinct, and the less prevalent one is in itself so important that it is necessary to co-ordinate them. White men go to uncivilised lands as missionaries desiring to benefit the natives, and they go to make money or a livelihood, desiring to benefit themselves. We are not concerned to investigate the doctrine which the missionary goes to preach, or its suit- ability to the mind of the savage : we need only concern ourselves here with the impulse and the method of the intercourse. Essentially, missionary enterprise is prompted by good- will, and devoid of personal self-seeking, and its aim is educational ; that is to say, it assumes that the savage has a soul that can be redeemed, or at least an intelligence that can be stimulated through teaching, by the reasonable presentation of truth or the per- suasive inculcation of beliefs which will change his desires and impulses and cause him to order his life in a manner not only con- 132 133 ducive to his eternal salvation, but also more agreeable to civilised standards. It is true that a great amount of missionary enterprise in the world's history has been far less sweetly reasonable in its methods than this. The great colonial expansion of Spain was inspired by religious zeal as emphatically as by eco- nomic motives ; the slave trade was justified in the name of salvation, and it would be a great error to regard this as a merely hypocri- tical pretext. But, taking the most charitable view of it, the missionary enterprise of Spain was conducted on the theory that conquest, annexation and forced labour were well- pleasing to God as a method of saving souls, and the result was that its outcome was slavery both of body and mind. The Spanish missionaries themselves were characteristically missionary in their personal impulse : the use that was made of the duty of proselytism by the secular side of the community does not obscure that fact. Where however, mission- aries have not been supported by secular force, as in the case of missions to savage tribes in Africa, where there has been nothing to tempt or to support secular invasion, the self-devotion of the missionary method has been more con- spicuous. The theory that the savage is an ignorant child who must be compelled for his own good has flourished less where the power to enforce discipline has been wanting. It may even be remarked that the policy of 134 the missionary school — the school that claims to deal with the coloured man solely with a view to his own progress, and not to the profit of the European — has taken of late years a distinct form, different from its earlier, namely, that of advocating the exclusion of secular white influence from native territories and institutions. To maintain the tribal system, the native courts, is the policy now advocated where it is still possible. It is only fully possible where white men are excluded from settlement, and from the exploitation of minerals and the other natural resources of the country. The problem then ceases — so far as that territory is concerned — to be one of " white capital and coloured labour." But it is difficult to believe that such exclusiveness can be maintained in any country suitable for white settlement. If certain areas are reserved for native occupation, the white man may claim reciprocally — as is in fact recommended by the South African Native Affairs Commis- sion — that the black man shall not be permitted to own land in the white areas, in which case, no matter how crowded his own area may become through his prolific multiplication, he can only enter the white man's country as a landless proletarian, and the problem is forth- with set up in its most precise form. Moreover, wherever the populations are already inter- mixed, such a course for allowing the coloured man to find his own line of development under 135 the intellectual stimulus of the white is im- practicable, as it is in the United States and the West Indies, and increasingly in South Africa. Further, it does not meet the unanswer- able claim of the white man that he has a right to go where he can live, nor his reason- able conviction that if he has admission to these territories he can by his productive and agricultural arts enable them to maintain and enrich both himself and the native. However suspect this claim and promise may be to the champions of native races, it is, so long as the white man conducts himself humanely and peacefully, a perfectly defensible claim. In any case, where the white man is driven by economic necessity and is strong enough to enforce it, it is one that will and must prevail, either peaceably or by violence, as it has prevailed in the colonisation of Australia and America, and in the pastoral colonisation of South Africa. In such circumstances it is idle to debate whether it is good or bad, justifiable or not. The educative protection of the coloured by the white, which is advocated by this branch of the missionary school, would anyhow leave the native in that state of economic indepen- dence that is so inconvenient to capitalist enterprise. So far as any such policy is carried into effect, it co-operates in that tendency to defeat the capitalist system which I have pointed out as a native characteristic of the 136 African temperament elsewhere. It excludes those incentives of land-monopoly and high taxation which the recent Commission on the Congo Free State recognised as necessary to bring the African to school. The theory that civilised races owe a duty to the uncivilised is no doubt held to-day by many people as a sincere moral conviction. So far as it is genuinely held it produces and supports missions of various kinds. It is a most real and valuable human impulse. But it has never, by itself, caused any race to annex the territory of any other or assume its govern- ment. It has assisted and served as a pretext (as in the Spanish colonisation) where there were inducements to the secular power, especially where the inducements were gold, precious stones, and metals, or produce having a high monopoly value, as spices and sugar once had. Failing these, it has never effectually operated to induce any white Power to "take up the white man's burden " ; so that practi- cally one must say that it has been impotent as a colonising force, and that whoever appeals to it as a reason for advocating colonisa- tion, or, rather, protectoral annexation of some tropical country, must, if he is to hope to be heard, show some other attraction as well. Quite reasonably, for the assumption of control calls for money. It becomes a business matter. If you want money from a business man you must show him a prospect of return, 137 If he does not want return, it is probable either that he is not a rich man, or that, if he is, he will not be prepared to pay very much. If he is prepared to sacrifice a great deal in order to bring the blessings of civilisation to the heathen without reward, he is rather the sort of man who will either become a missionary himself or will prefer to support missionary enterprise in missionary methods. We must accordingly recognise that the theory that white races impose or should impose their presence on coloured races from missionary motives is vain. I have referred to it at this length, vain as it is, because we have heard so much of it in recent years. No. The truly efficient cause of inter-racial inter- course is, and always has been, economic motive : the exercise, not of a duty of elevating backward races, but of the personal right or determination to live. No one has any call to abuse the white man for following this impulse. The proposition that any race has a sacred right to exclude strangers from the advantages of the territory it occupies so long as those strangers conduct themselves inoffen- sively is indefensible. The right of exclusion is simply one of might and of domestic con- venience. Unfortunately, the experience which uncivilised tribes have had of immigrant white men has generally been such as to cause them now to regard all whites as a source of danger, and the inoffensive suffer in cons§- 138 quence. No one can say that the European has not the right to settle in Africa, because at the time of his coming it was sparsely inhabited by savages of another race. The savage has no justification for killing the peaceful immigrant, and though it is quite intelligible that he should do so, we cannot blame the white settler for killing him when he attempts it. Land monpoly has no more a divine sanction in savage than in civilised countries. It may be — it often has been — by no means the fault of the white man if his coming brings bloodshed. On the other hand it is unquestionable that white colonisation, impelled by the economic motive, has often been marked by abominable treacheries and cruelties. These are not a necessity of the case, and therefore I do not labour them ; I merely wish to call attention to the modern form of the old combination of proselytism and personal interest. The old form, exemplified in the Spanish colonisation was : Annex and govern these regions, because by so doing you will bring the heathen under the ministrations of Holy Church, and, no matter what befalls their bodies, their souls will be saved by their conversion and by the Sacraments. We sometimes hear an echo of this form to-day ; for instance, when it is argued by a Colonial bishop that the inden- turing of Chinese for Africa will give them a similar chance ; but for the most part the 139 doctrine is more secular. It is that the white man and the white man's civilisation are a higher and better thing than the black (which is not at all an Evangelical Christian doc- trine, nor one acted upon in practice by the most effectual missionaries) ; and that the industrial system of the white man — not his learning or even his religion — is the best school for the black man's education. It is quite common for British philanthropists of this school to maintain that Islam is a better religion for Africans than Christianity. It is notable that Christian Missionaries have very often dissented vehemently from the educational theories of this school. They have indeed complained, very generally, that the contact of the civilised man, in pursuit of his own profit, with the coloured, has been largely demoralising. (The secular school have not been slow to return the compliment, and to allege that the native converted is a native spoiled.) The missionaries have desired to interfere with the sale of spirits to the natives — an article of luxury of which there is great consumption in all civilised countries. Their theory of the content of education differs. They believe in giving the instruments of knowledge, in the form of reading, writing, and book-learning. The secular school point to the African " scholar " as a deplorable pro- duct, and advocate an education exclusively manual and technical. Each school is doubtless right in much of its criticism of the other ; but the missionary school has the cleaner hands, and its theory is the less tinged with motive. Unfortunately, the work of both is in its characteristic manner destructive of the form of life that has nurtur- ed the race, and by this action must do what for the moment at least seems injury. For instance, if the native, under the teaching of Christianity, abandons polygamy, his social system is disturbed by the creation of a class of homeless women. If he abandons his tribe to work for wages in the white centres of industry not only is his contribution towards the support of ineffectives withdrawn from it, but he forfeits that claim himself, and has the prospect of destitution before him in his old age. If the missionary contact has failed to effect all it aimed at it has at any rate not furnished him with new vices. This the town- civilisation of mining centres abundantly does. XIV. EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS. In the contact of white and coloured in the native lands of the latter, that process of fusion by interbreeding to which 1 alluded as significant in some other parts of the world does not appear likely to play an important part. That men of mixed European and African breed are destined to be influential in advancing the solution of race problems of the United States and the West Indies can hardly be questioned. But in these countries special social conditions both con- duced to the original and derivative inter- breeding and favoured the survival and niurture of offspring. Where the white has not possessed the black in slavery there has arisen no such considerable class of mixed blood, at any rate in British Colonies, and the prejudice on the part of the white element against in- terbreeding has been originally stronger and tends to increase in strength. I have pointed out that where such a hybrid class has come into being and has attained an organic and honourable position in a mixed community it is, in fact, an advantageous element ; but it is clear that such a class cannot be expected 141 142 to attain such a position in the near future in those vast African dominions which white men have of recent years begun to attempt to exploit. It is in these countries that white and black are, or will be, most distinctly con- fronted in the class division of employer and employee, and in such countries, in the com- parative absence of this hybrid " middle class " this confrontation appears likely to persist most stubbornly. The biological race dis- tinctions which are the basis of so much of race antagonism, will be the less subject to modification, and any bridging of the gulf must be effected the more exclusively by the operation of intellectual influences. In the promotion of these, however, even a small number of talented men of mixed race, if loyal to the best in both sides of their parentage, can do much to act as profitable interpreters and intermediaries. As already observed, whatever real and substantial incompatibilities there may be between races, judgment of their importance is deeply prejudiced by the importation of the relation of employer and employee. No matter how reasonably it may be asserted that the interests of the two classes are identical it remains unquestionable that this economic relation does obscure and distort the appre- hension of more deeply human relations. This prejudice affects the views of the question of the black man's education as it does other 143 judgements concerning him. There is always a tendency for the employing, or would-be employing, class to disparage and under- estimate the capacity of the employee class for education (it is the case all over the world, and not merely as between white and black), whilst, at the same time, there is a dread of giving the proletariat education, lest they should become too clever, and get notions above their station. The African races generally have a subtle dialectical faculty, and are, in some ways, far quicker in apprehension than the average Caucasian. These faculties and the African's natural gift of rhetoric are often to be observed in somewhat erratic exercise, owing to the poverty of the material they are employed on : in other words, the educated or rather the sophisticated African is frequently a windbag ; but, wherever he has to deal with the familiar material of his own personal interests, educa- tion does not leave him a windbag,but distinctly increases his capacity. He can assimilate what he sees a use for. I have said that the West Indian negro is nf)t fit for complete democratic citizenship in a constitution of modern Parliamentary form, and I should certainly hold the same opinion with respect to any African native community. But with respect to the matters which touch his daily life in a small commimity, the African, whether at home, or even in exile, after the great hiatus 144 of slavery, shows practical shrewdness and aptitude for the affairs of local government. His legal acumen is higher than that of the European. The operations of a civilised Euro- pean State are at present out of range of his experience, but the meaning of taxation, the meaning of the restriction of his access to land, of his experiences in service with the white man, are things that he comes very easily to understand ; and as soon as he becomes at all literate he proves a very acute interpreter of the contents of written con- tracts. In these respects, however much the fact may be obscured by his illiteracy, his alien language, and the other obstacles to a clear understanding of him, the so-called savage of most African tribes, having had for so many generations to live by his wits or his cunning, has really a considerable start of the average white unskilled labourer of Europe, with whom we tend to compare him. The counsel of those who recommend that the black man in a mixed community should not be educated, lest he should become a danger, is idle. Mere contact and intercourse with the white gives a stimulus to his intellect and his will, which sets him on the track of such knowledge as is relevant to his practical needs, and, from the lowest point of view it is safer for the white man that he should have the opportunity of getting this knowledge right end foremost. H5 The educational problem is not going to be solved, either, by the blessed word " manual instruction." It is pathetic to hear the obscurantist planter, the colonist who believes in keeping the natives in their place, relenting towards the missionary who sets up a technical school, and speaking quite tolerantly of him. The missionary has learnt much in the school of experience. He is not teaching his scholars trades for the benefit of the white employer ; but because the Colonial white man has made it impossible for him to teach the natives, for their own benefit, anything else, except per- haps the best thing of all — the belief in human character. The missionaries wouldhave liked to make their scholars Christians. This might have been possible had the missionaries had the field to themselves, as they had in the early days in the Bechuana country. A wise native ruler, like Khama, may be quite capable of recognising the superiority of Christianity to paganism as an instrument of the human spirit, and of adopting it as his tribal religion with good results, not the least among them being the co operation of white missionary influences in securing his lands from the fate of those of his neighbours, the Mashonas and Matabeles. But the native does not believe in words and names, except as convenient instruments for a purpose ; he believes in facts and forces ; and he sees that the white men with whom he has to do in the relations of 146 fact and force are not Christians either in doctrine or in practice. White contact and immigration, therefore, will not make Africa Christian. They will tend to do so less and less as the secular interest gains ground on the spiritual in the white man's contact with them. Whatever the white man's Ju Ju may seem to be for the African (and it is plainly a good thing, full of marvellous powers), it evidently does not come out of Nazareth. The Bible of the missionaries implants that dangerous ferment that made LoUardry and the Villein's revolt in England, the Hussites and the peasant war in Germany, congregational and democratic Protestantism in France, and the rest of the Jacqueries, all beaten out by fire and sword and exile so long as the privileged castes could fight that spirit in Europe, and now that it takes form in the Ethiopian church, denounced and stamped out to-day with the same weapons and on the same secular grounds. This kind of Christianity the native, like his forerunner in Europe, can apprehend, and he is taught it is heresy. He will not accept High Anglicanism in its place : he is too rebellious and independent of spirit, too Protestant and congregational for Roman Catholicism. But the missionary can doctor him and can teach him trades, and for these things he will still thank the missionary. And because he loves those that love him, more 147 easily and instinctively than the Caucasian, and because he trusts those whom he has come to know are honest, the missionary may still for a long time have power with him. , In considering the effects on the black of contact with the white, the character of his psychical constitution, especially in its religious aspect, must be borne in mind. The African is more completely steeped or im- mersed in religion — call it, if you will, super- stition — than the average European that confronts him. Whereas we live habitually in the sensible and rational world, and only by an effort and half-sceptically take cognisance even of what we recognise as sub- conscious parts of our nature, having positive existence and activity, the African never thinks of anything as having merely sensible or material existence. Everything for him is body of spirit, him- self included, and the fact that the bodily existence is only one side of existence for him partly accounts for his indifference to human life. Human sacrifices, cannibalism, and other ceremonial barbarities among the pagan tribes, the recklessness of slaughter at the chief's bidding in the military tribes, are all bound up with this outlook on life and with the position of the chief as the supreme em- bodiment and interpreter of the spiritual power. The subconscious, subliminal, part of the influences and powers that we discern in 148 the human mind bears a much greater pro- portion to the conscious and rationalised part in the African than in the civilised European. This is not only to say that he is more emotional, which he is, in good senses as well as in bad, or that he is more the child of passion : he is in some respects less so ; in some more : it means that a greater proportion of what enters into his consciousness is fluid and plastic to the imagination. The pressure and exigencies of evolution in civilised life have not provided him with that great and elaborate superstructure of popular science, habits, and formulas that takes up most of our own attention and consciousness, so en- grossing it for the most part that we have almost come to ignore the existence of any- thing outside or beneath it. The African, like the psychic medium, has his consciousness more open to what is beneath this superficial raft of established means of survival in terrestrial consciousness, and, like the medium, he formulates as real existences in definite shapes the impressions that come to him out of the vague depths of life. Hence his capacity for quick adaptation to the forms of the white man's religion and rhetoric ; hence, too, the comparative shallowness of their real hold upon him. How far the African's conscious- ness really penetrates deeper than the civilised man's into the abysses of his own temperament it is impossible to conjecture : all one can say 149 is that whilst within the narrow bounds of his rational and practical world he is markedly and even grossly practical, he is at the same time more conscious of the unformulated powers of life and less under the dominion of the formulated. Hence, also, his comparative inaccessibility to rational economic motive, and his consequent unreliability as a wage worker. Hence his quickness of direct sym- pathetic apprehension in many respects, and his appreciation of the emotional and demo- cratic elements of evangelical Christianity. Take into account with this fluid mass of temperament the great bodily strength of the African, his efficient nutrition, his reproductive vitality, and his comparative intractability to anything except physical force in the attempt of the white man to make him work for his profit, and it must, I think, appear difficult to imagine that he is not likely to have a good deal of his own way in his future social and industrial development. There is a strong ground for presumption that that will not be the way of civilised industrial evolution, as we have seen it in our own countries, no matter how much this may appear to its professors the only conceivable school for human progress. The time has gone by when the coloured man could be dealt with entirely by force. Absolute disciplinary domination will no more be tolerated now by that public sentiment that, 150 with intermittent reactionary interruptions, finally leads and determines history in such matters, than chattel slavery would be. Even into the hell of the Congo Free State humane opinion fitfully penetrates. In the principal presentations of the problem of the relations of white capital and coloured labour the solution of difficulties by extermination of the original natives, which has been practically effected in Australia and North America, is unthinkable. The creation of solitudes, as in the Congo State and Angora, where once were populous villages, along certain trade routes, by the fear of the white man and of his carriers and bodyguard, can only be a temporary phenomenon. Carried too far it would destroy the profit of trading, the route would be abandoned, and the population would in course of time renew itself. Even if the white man were in a position to kill out the native African, as he killed out the native American, which he is not, either physically or morally, the fundamental assumption of all our study of this question is that he wants the black man's labour, and so must preserve him alive. This assumption granted, it is as certain that the position of the black man in the State where he mixes with the white must approach more and more to equality as it was that such an approach should be made by the descendants of the conquered Saxons and Britons. Plausible as may be the doctrine that the black man is a child, and must be dealt with as such, it must inevitably break down before the natural reactions of the human will. Such a theory always blindly ignores all that con- tent of the black man's consciousness which is not obvious from its own point of view. As I have put it above, it ignores that the mind of the native is a full cup, and gives its own account of whatever comes into it. The fact is that the white man does not come to the black treating him as a child. He either comes to him setting up an industrial relation, and calling for him as a labourer, or setting up a State and calling on him for taxes. Now, in either of these relations there is nothing of the child and the teacher. There is nothing occult, or demanding high political erudition in the doctrine that taxation should imply representation. The argument for the native has nothing to do with the question whether the person from whom the taxes are demanded is fit for political power in a civilised State or not ; it is a perfectly simple and elementary form of the question that any man will ask of any other who comes and demands money from him : " What for ? If I am to pay you money what am I to get for it, and how am I to know that I get it ? " The black man needs no education to ask this question, nor, when he is told that the demand is to provide for the Government that fosters him, does he need any political agitation to prompt him to ask 152 where the fostering is exhibited. Where results for his benefit are shown, he, on his side, shows himself quite capable of appreciating them ; but where the operations of the State exhibit themselves chiefly in limiting his access to land and putting pressure on his industrial liberty, he is equally capable of invincible impenetrability to the white man's logic. In that case, if you want his money you will have to take it by force, or the fear of force. And if the black man thinks, as Wat Tyler did about the poll tax, and as Hampden did about the ship-money, that he can put up a good fight on the question, we may safely expect he will try it. That is all there is in the mystery of the native mind of which we have been so frequently admonished of late. XV. THE INFLUENCE OF THE WHITE ON THE BLACK. Mr. HiLAiRE Belloc, in his recently published book, " Esto Perpetua," views Europe from the edge of the African continent, and with the Sahara and the Soudan at his back, pours out his admiration and gratitude for the white man's work for Humanity. It is a justified attitude. The white man is to the black a force whose significance he cannot ignore. However fearless the black may be in fight, the white is to him what is conveyed in the Greek adjective " deinos," a creature ingeni- ously terrible, and he is more. He can command the black man, win his confidence, and even his loyalty, because at his best he has in him, more fully realised and emanci- pated, human qualities that the black man prizes in himself, and whose virtue he covets as necessary to his own self-realisation. The black man does not love the white man qua j white man ; seldom, perhaps, even the indi- 1 vidual white man as a person ; but the genius, faculties, and deeds of the white man fascinate/ and arrest him, not only as manifestations ofl power, but because they stir in him a latent) 153 154 confidence that he can imitate, acquire, and exercise the same. That in the partially educated coloured man and woman this aspiration sometimes shows itself in grotesque forms, of monkey fashions of costume and behaviour, of aspirations to a creamy sallow- ness of complexion, extending to the use of pearl powder on a sable skin for Sunday church-going, and the like, must not be allowed to obscure the fact that the influence and aspiration are real, and that through this manner of stimulus only is there much prospect of the white man contributing to the improve- ment of the coloured. Where his economic interests conflict with those of natives he improves them off the face of the earth. There are, in such circumstances, no good Indians, except dead Indians. Where there is no such direct competition, his commerce may destroy and demoralise them, his demand for their labour break up their tribal system and convert them into a landless proletariat. One cannot but be struck, in the West Indies, with the comparative insignificance of what the coloured man has learnt industrially from the white ; and this consideration is one of the sources of despondency as to the out- look in some of those communities. And yet, in many respects, he has learnt and acquired a great deal. Only it seems he has not learnt the things that the white man tried to teach him, and did temporarily teach him for his, 155 the master's, advantage. But he learns and will learn the things that he perceives to be for his own advantage. He does not want more white civilisation than he chooses to take. The most interesting and instructive material for a study of the probable future development of the native in South Africa will be found in a comparison of his social evolution in the cases of Basutoland and Bechuanaland, and in the territories that are being occupied and governed as "white man's countries," and where the tendency is to curtail the native's access to land, and to bring him into industrial tutelage. Equally interesting in regard to black terri- tories of West Africa is the enormous experiment taken in hand in the Protectorates of Nigeria, and the hinterlands of the Gold Coast and Sierra Leone, where also the native is left as yet in possess! on of his land, and British administra- tion aims only at establishing peace, justice, and safety of access and passage. So far as the white man has any direct industrial aim in these territories it must, at any rate for a long time to come, be limited to attempts to induce the native to grow the products he wants, and to assist him to improve his agri- cultural processes with this object. That the white element will, in other respects, form an effectual progressive leaven in so vast a population is hardly to be expected. 156 Men will reap what they sow. To imagine that those who put themselves into contact with uncivilised races with a view to their own economic profit are going morally to improve those savages, is the most simple- minded of self-complacencies. The next step in the argument is generally that, because you are mentally elevating and civilising the native by such contact, you are entitled in bodily matters to coerce him, to punish him for dis- obedience. If you persist in this deluded course of conduct, one day you are " treacherously " shot by the native, and you have to "give him a lesson." Or you find the natives are dying out under your treatment, and then you speak of a mysterious law of Nature. The causes of the extinction of native races are only a mystery at a distance. On the spot they are easily recognisable as violence and starvation and civilised drinks and diseases. Extermination, in fact, is the only way, on that road, to get out of your difficulties. On the countries where the white man has, with whatever philanthropic excuse orpretext, enslaved or used the black for his own eco- nomic profit, a curse still rests ; on the West Indies ; on the Southern States of America. They are sad lands. The harvest has been reaped and carried; the fortunes are spent the industrial system has perished. Only in so far as the contact was not altogether one of economic self-seeking, only because of human 157 recognition and human influence between the races, has there been any permanent gain. Where colour prejudice rules, where human identity is most passionately disowned, whether it be in the White Republic or in the Black, there the prospect of the emergence of a wholesome society is least hopeful ; where prejudice has died down and men take rank on their merits, there the community shows most promise. Fortunately, as there is no such thing as the pure "economic man" of politico-economic hypothesis, so there is no European nation that is purely economic in its contact with the natives. (The Directorate of the Congo Free State is not such a nation, and, unfortunately, not responsible to any such organic com- munity.) If it is the hungry or enterprising adventurers of a nation that come into contact with coloured races, their ultimate support rests upon public opinion at home. I have pointed out how, in the British West India Colonies, after the emancipation of the slaves, the system of Crown Government acted as a safeguard to the black against misgovern- ment by the employing class. And the contact between the races has never been only as between employer and employed ; there has always been the religious missionary class, whose attitude, however unenlightened its dogmas, has ever been that of a spiritual brotherhood, and which, with whatever follies 158 of method, has fought unweariedly for the principles of education and enlightenment ; and there has generally been the administra- tive class, also, in motive, largely missionary, or, if doing its work more from public spirit and executive ambition than from sympathetic philanthropy towards the governed, at any rate free from any interest in their exploitation. Where this class is corrupt and cruel the situation is truly desperate. And, finally, the white man who goes out to mix with the coloured in commercial and industrial relations, subdued though his hand may be to what he works in, has human contact at many points with the native, and influences and is in- fluenced by him through them. I have re- marked that the power of getting work out of negroes on West Indian estates is almost entirely a matter of the personal qualities of the employer or overseer, and that the relation of master and slave in these colonies and in the United States before emancipation, was one in which personal relations had a far more important place than they have in the relations between the average civilised employer and his hired hand. This was one of the redeem- ing features of slavery, and this, not the industrial training or discipline which it might have given, but which has left so little result, was the means of its contribution to that progress which the transplanted African un- questionably has made in the lands he now 159 inhabits. And with regard to that divergence from civilised standards, in regard to cere- monial marriage, which is, perhaps, the greatest cause of scandal and headshaking to the American or English tourist visitor to the West Indies, it must be said that the white man not only destroyed the African's custom of marriage, but sedulously by precept and example, educated him in the looser relations to which he is now addicted. Those who despise the black man most are those who have failed to get him to do for them something they desired that he should do for their profit, and who have injured and demoralised him in the attempt. Those who despise him least and who are most hopeful of his future, most confident that he can assimilate elements of progress from the white man, are those who have had to do with him in relations where no desire to exploit his labour has intervened. If industry would be good for him and if it is essential that he should learn to be more industrious, the im- pulse must not come from forcible pressure on the part of the would-be employer, or it will leave no permanent gain, save suspicion and estrangement between the races. It certainly does not leave the habit of industry. That can only be maintained by the stimulus of the worker's own quickened will. XVI. SHORT VIEWS AND LONG VIEWS ON WHITE AND BLACK. The practical politician — every man, that is, who has to decide for immediate action — must need take short views of life. With him it is — eat or be eaten — do or die. Every white man in contact with the African, as a colonist seeking the use of his labour, far more so as a settler establishing his occu- pancy amongst hostile or suspicious aliens, is under this necessity — a necessity very different from that vmder which the critical sociologist and the philosophic historian frame their judgments. For mere survival a certain amount of positive selfishness, of greed, of injustice, even of violence, is necessary, even for dwellers in civilised states. The essence of civilisation is to disguise the self-seeking and violence by organising social injustice and corporate class interests, a process which frees the individual from the appearance and consciousness of personal responsibility, whilst infinitely enhancing the emoluments of his organised selfishness. His personal interest, transfigured to him as that of his profession, his class or his country, presents itself in the 1 60 i6i gratifying aspect of altruism ; his class interest as an essential of social order, his national conquests as God's purpose for the governance of the world. Such altruistic projections of self-interest are necessary for self-respect, and are, in a measure, steps in the evolution of a truly social existence based on consciousness of human fellowship and equality without personal or class-conflict. In industrial relations everywhere this altruistic projection of immediate self-interest takes form in the class-opposition of capital and labour : in commimities of mixed colours it takes form in race-opposition and colour prejudice. It happens that in tropical countries, where white men cannot endure bodily labour, necessity and prejudice com- bine to establish among them the social convention that the working class in the mixed community shall be of the coloured race, and the corresponding, but not neces- sarily correlative, demand that the employers shall be the white. So far as the division in industrial relation does really come to cor- respond with the racial division, the class prejudices and class illusions that arise be- tween the capitalist and proletarian sections of civilised societies energetically reinforce the race prejudices and race illusions that dominate all barbarous peoples, and so quickly impose themselves on any community, how- ever racially mongrel, that develops any sort l62 of corporate consciousness — as for instance in the recently prevalent absurdity of the myth of the " Anglo-Saxon " Race. The critical observer of mixed communities can see both these factors of class prejudice at work, and reacting for mutual reinforce- ment, as to-day in South Africa ; but whilst he may quite accurately impute a good deal of the avowed social theory of such com- munities to the influence of these altruistic projections of personal interest it is quite likely that, if he has no personal experience of the local conditions, he may over-rate the influence of prejudice and imder-rate that of the immediate personal necessity of the settler endeavouring to establish and maintain his own existence in alien surroundings, in circumstances in which he has to take short views and act under the stress of the moment for the sake of his own survival and without any pretence of humanitarian principle. Let me endeavour to state, very briefly, some of the circumstances that impose the short view. These may, perhaps, be most concisely and generally indicated by pointing out that the uncolonised African is a savage. There is not necessarily racial significance in the con- dition of savagery or paganism : its opposi- tion is to civilisation or Christianity. The Saxon hordes that invaded Britain were savages : their social codes and customs were 163 like their mode of subsistence, very similar to those characteristic of contemporary African peoples. Their tribal economy was based on the possession of cattle, the tilling of allot- ments of communal land, the maintenance of the war-host of all able-bodied free men for plunder and self-defence, the slavery of captives and the conquered and the subjection of women. In such a savage community all secular offences are personal matters. Reli- gious or ceremonial offences — all departments of the practice of witchcraft-^are public matters. Presumably the survival and per- sistence of this ancestral instinct is the reason why the "smelling out" and burning of witches maintained itself in England until quite recently, and why heresy hunting has survived nineteen centuries of Christian teaching. But the really important point for the white immigrant colonist is the personal assessment of the secular offence, what he sees as the immorality of the savage. With the savage killing, theft, and deceit are not subjects of moral judgment except on the profit of their outcome ; there is no restraint of conscience or compimction against them. All killing is mere homicide, and its right or wrong depends as entirely and as exclusively on the value of the life taken as it does in all the feuds of the story of " Burnt Njal." To take your enemy's life is of value to you and your tribe, and accordingly meritorious. 164 White men, therefore, living in contact with African tribal peoples are living amongst men whose tribal duty it is to be able and ready to kill, and who have not the slightest moral compunction about doing so if they see their interest or their satisfaction in it. A savage no doubt will not kill without some positive reason for doing so, but the reason that may induce him to do so may seem to the civilised man as horribly trivial as the reasons for many of the killings in the Icelandic Njal Saga. His positive reasons may be of various kinds — private vengeance for injury or the desire for sacrificial " medi- cine " — or social conspiracy to destroy the in- vading white man or exterminate him when he has settled. But whatever the sufiicient positive motive, there is in the perfect savage no restraint from anything of the nature of " conscience " or moral compunction, the only checks are personal fear of retaliation or failure, or considerations of other personal disadvantage likely to result from the deed. Moreover, the African, characteristically, decides and acts under direction of the mob- impulse : the control of the collective social sub-consciousness is powerful in all his affairs. The decision of his tribal councils are habit- ually unanimous — the undivided judgment of the minority is not simply over-ridden by a majority vote — it is transmuted and dis- appears. As I have said, all the labourers on i65 a West Indian estate will strike work with a sympathetic unanimity unknown to the best- organised British Trade Union, and the best labour of Africans — digging, tree-felling, rail- way making, housebuilding — is done in gangs with abundant chatter and singing. When violence and arson, riot and homicide are on hand this irrational contagiousness becomes the greatest danger of mixed communities, as every one knows who has had to do with collections of Africans under the incentive of such excitement, whether in Africa or even, after a century of transplantation and civilisa- tion, in the West Indies. This knowledge — the latent fear of this uncontrolled possibility in the coloured man, is contributory to an attitude of white towards coloured in mixed communities which is apt itself to appear barbarous. It is barbarous in the strict sense of the word, being the reflex in the white man of the black man's temper in this connection. For so long as the white man's life and settlement are in danger, or are believed to be so, he will not take the long view prescribed by the Buddhist and Christian religions, he will not give himself to feed the tiger nor abstain from resisting aggression. He will deem it his first business to secure his own survival and to meet the coloured man on his own groimd, if any question of struggle arises. When the savage kills he makes no complaint that the civilised man should kill i66 back. It may be that the world would ad- vance quicker if the white man abstained from doing so, but that, to the pioneer of settle- ment, is an off-chance which he may be excused for neglecting, when his life and that of his family and friends are concerned, in comparison with the certainty that if he does not meet the savage in methods that the latter understands, he and his, at anyrate in this life, will not share in that advance. And every man not a missionary who goes into contact with coloured races goes primarily with the purpose and intention of living and maintaining himself : the paramoxmt demand of the logic of his situation is that he should not be killed ; that he should kill the native rather, if the latter will not allow him peace- ful settlement. The white man in contact with barbarism, however humane, may very well find himself compelled to act barbarously: this is only one of the ways in which contact with inferior peoples may demoralise the civilised man ; and the sense of this demoral- ising influence, on himself and his children, is often a source of resentment to him and a positive factor in the creation of race pre- judice. "White women especially, I think, hate the black folk amongst whom they live very generally because they feel that association with them demoralises and barbarises their children. What I have noted as to homicide, namely, 167 that with the tribal African it is still only judged of by the standard of the mediaeval Saxon or Norseman, that is to say as merely a question of the price to be paid by the slayer and his family or gildsmen, and is not judged by any standard of sinfulness or criminality, applies, of course, equally to the spheres of property and sex-relations. They are not the subject of any prescriptive moral judgment. If no one that can retaliate is injured, there is no offence ; and injury to any person of influence can be punished or redressed by the payment of the proper price. Morality in such matters is not yet existent, or is at best quite rudi- mentary. And the man of short views, in contact and in dealings with races devoid of his accustomed moral standards is under strong inducement to waive his own and to deal with the savage as the savage would deal with him and with his own fellows. He has only his own self-respect to restrain him. The respect of the savage for any moderation on his part will be very far to seek. The colonist, living as he does under a different necessity from the civilised home dweller, inevitably comes to take short views in practical matters in regard to which the latter has leisure and security to assert more far seeing doctrines. I have spoken above of his code of industrial morality, which is not that of the uncivilised African, nor of his transplanted descendant in the New World. i68 The industrial code of slave morality domin- ates native communities. It is because the native uncolonised African, conquered in war, has still before him only the same two alter- natives as the ancient Greek had or the middle-age Saxon, that is death or thraldom, it is because his women do not own them- selves and are in perpetual tutelage, that he accepts slavery, as in the Congo State and the Island of San Thom^, resignedly and fatal- istically, as he accepted it in the days when Bristol grew great on the profits of the export slave trade. Here again is tempta- tion to the conquering white man to encroach on his liberties — to deal with him as he would not deal with a civilised white worker. I have noticed that other reaction of the slave morality, that makes it the test of a free man not to work under pledge or contract for any employer, and the test of a wise and clever man to do as little work under compulsion or for pay as he can manage to get through with. The colonist, under this different necessity, requiring labour from the black man to keep himself, as the capitalist and endowed class at home need it from the wage worker, and finding he cannot obtain it on the same terms, is here again under temptation to take short views, to accommodate his practice to his environment, to preach coercion and discip- line as absolutely necessary, and to see, as the natives see, no moral harm in them. 1 69 Is it wonderful that white men, settled among black, confronted every day with habits and mental attitudes so different from their own, so hostile to their interests, to their very life, so constantly provocative to what they feel to be their own baser tenden- cies, should in defence of their own ideals, if not in self-excuse or self protection, conceive and assert the theory of an insurmountable race-barrier ? And yet it is indisputable that where the African has ceased to be un-moral, has learnt through Christianity or Islam a generalised conception of obligation, another standard of right and wrong than that of mere personal advantage or grievance, where he has acquired full and equal citzenship, where industrial difficulties have solved themselves by the practical emancipation of the black labourer, race prejudice has become the mere shadow of its former self. I have already quoted Professor Royce, of Harvard, in aid of my statements on this point in regard to the British West Indies. I wish to reinforce the conclusions I have set forth from my own ob- servation on the subject of race prejudice in its widest aspect by quoting further from the same notable essay* : — "Scientifically viewed, these problems of ours turn out not to be so much problems caused by anything which is essential to the ♦International Journal of Ethics, April, igo6. "Race Questions and Race Prejudices," by Josiah Royce. 170 existence or to the nature of the races of men themselves. Our so-called race problems are merely the problems caused by our antipathies. " Now the mental antipathies of men, like the fears of men, are very elemental, wide- spread, and momentous mental phenomena. But they are also in their fundamental nature extremely capricious, and also extremely suggestible mental phenomena. Let an individ- ual man alone and he will feel antipathies for certain other human beings very much as any young child does, namely, quite caprici- ously, just as he will feel all sorts of caprici- ous likings for people. But, train a man first to give names to his antipathies, and then to regard the antipathies thus named as sacred merely because they have a name, and then you get the phenomena of racial hatred, of religious hatred, of class hatred, and so on in- definitely. Such trained hatreds are peculiar- ly pathetic and peculiarly deceitful, because they combine in such a subtle way the elemental vehemence of the hatred that a child may feel for a stranger, or a cat for a dog, with the appearance of dignity and sol- emnity and even of duty which a name gives. Such antipathies will always play their part in human history. But what we can do about them is to try not to be fooled by them, not to take them too seriously because of their mere name. We can remember that they are 171 childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with a dread of snakes, or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats, and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature. " All such elemental social experiences are highly suggestible. Our social training largely consists in the elimination or in the intensification or in the systematizing of these original reactions through the influence of suggestion and of habit. Hence the anti pathy.once by chance aroused, but then named, imitated, insisted upon, becomes to its vic- tims a sort of sacred revelation of truth, sacred merely because it is felt, a revelation merely because it has won a name and a social standing. "What such sacred revelations, however, really mean, is proved by the fact that the hungry traveller, if deprived of his breakfast long enough, by means of an accidental delay of his train, or the tired camper in the forest, may readily come to feel whatever racial antipathy you please against his own brother, if the latter then wounds social susceptibilities which the abnormal situation has made momentarily hyperaesthetic. " For my part, I am a member of the human race, and this is a race which is, as a whole, considerably lower than the angels, so that the whole of it very badly needs race elevation In this need of my race I personally and verj 173 deeply share. And it is in this spirit only that I am able to approach our problem." The long view — the view justified by history and experience, with regard to mixed communities and racial distinctions — is that nothing final can be asserted with regard to them ; only that the special characteristics of the moral and social principles which we now find prevailing in savage peoples, of alien breed to ourselves, have mostly been character- istics of peoples of all races in the correspond- ing stage of social evolution, and are, therefore, not racial. They will yield to the same, or similar influences, as have eliminated them from our own societies. But as they have taken centuries to transmute among the Caucasian races, it is not to be supposed that they will vanish in a generation, or by the mere operation of " conversion " in the African of to-day. Nor, I think, is it likely that some of them will vanish at all. I have not in these chapters attempted a complete discussion of the pro- blem of mixed communities. I have only entered into these questions where they have obvious connexion with the difficulties that arise out of inter-racial relations in the in- dustrial category, and it is because these relations tend continually to reduce them- selves to those of master and servant, em- ployer and employee, that my treatment of the subject as one of "White Capital and 173 Coloured Labour " has been even so discursm in regard to race-relations as it has been. Mj argument with regard to them has been thai race-prejudice is the fetish of the man of shor1 views ; and that it is a short-sighted anc suicidal creed, with no healthy future for the community that entertains it. At the same time a natural, intelligible, and, to some degree, an excusable and justifiable view. That the long view demands the contrary attitude, to recognise that race limitations not only do not hold good eternally against educational influences, but cannot be relied on as a foundation for any sound political archi- tecture ; that the human will is wider than the racial will, and will not, in any mixed community, rest content within its own em- bodiment. The more backward race, the class adjudged servile, will constantly be infringing the monopolies of the leading race, asserting and discovering equality with the white man in spheres which he has con- ceived naturally his own province. The assignment of the status of labourer to the coloured man is of no avail when he can refuse to give his labour, and it seems to me that in the sphere of industry one great pre- rogative of white civilisation is likely to remain its exclusive privilege. The impres- sion I have derived from my survey is that the methods of the capitalist Grande Industrie, the perfect organisation of capital and wage proletariat, that has developed itself in 174 civilised countries through land monopoly and industrial anarchy, do not, and do not appear likely to commend themselves to African races, that they cannot be imposed upon them except through a policy of ex- clusion from land, and of forced labour ; and that any attempt to force those races into them not only does not benefit them, but is likely to prove disastrous to both black and white. If the white colonist cannot compel the coloured to work for him, and cannot live in tropical lands unless he can induce his co- operation, the basis of his supremacy in those countries must rest — as in fact it does rest — on a spiritual superiority. The white man can lead and govern the savage because and in so far as he is not himself a savage. The principles by virtue of which the white European has obtained a leadership which even Islam cannot contest with him are prin- ciples which deny race distinctions. There is his strength. If he goes back from them he becomes himself a barbarian, and though he may exterminate the black he cannot lead or live with him. I have known West Indian negroes thank God for Slavery, as having been a means to their people of advance towards freedom un. known to the Savage. But I have never known them thank the white man for slavery. It is not the slave-owning side or the slave- driving section of the civilised white that has '75 freed them ; they know that the elements in white civilisation and character through which they have attained their social and spiritual freedom are not the same as those that brought them into slavery. Of the side of human character that enslaves, and of the motives for enslavement, the African knows far too much for him ever to give the white man credit foi educational purpose in any aggression he may make on his liberties. Genuinely philanthropic and honest advocates there may be of the Educational policy; but the African will always regard it with black suspicion. Sus- picion, bred of the fear of enslavement and oppression ingrained by generations of savagery, and a cunning that dissembles his true aims, are characteristics deeply rooted and obstinately persistent in the African. The West Indian peasant negro is full of them. He maintains imder forms of submission and compliance his independent personal and racial will and judgment. He will not finally take what the white man, in his own personal interest gives him, but what he himself chooses, and can realise. No mixed com- munity can attain unity and health if the white man assumes an attitude which stimu- lates and maintains this alienating suspicion in the black, or where one governing class bases its polity on the short sighted theory that the dividing habits of Race are perman- ently stronger than the unifying force of Humanity. ^he Socialist Ibibrarg Vol. I. — Socialism and Positive Science. By ENRICO FERRI (Professor of Penal Law in the University of Rome). Translated by Edith C. Harvey. Paper i/- net, Cloth i/6 net. Fourth Edition. " No more representative type of militant and systematic Socialism could have been chosen. The series which this volume inaugurates promises to be both interesting and instructive, and will doubtless find attentive readers In other tlian Socialist circles." Sydney Ball in the "Economic Journal. ' Vol. II.— Socialism and Society. By J. RAMSAY MACDONALD. Paper x/- net, Cloth i/6. Fourth Edition. 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