It has been made clear that the intensity of civilization in Latin America
is in inverse ratio to the numerical proportion of the Negro in the populations
of the various cultural centers. That where the whites are in greater
preponderance the culture is more advanced. The Negro's depressing influence
upon civilization is observable, not in Latin America alone, but in the
portions of the United States where his numbers are great; in South Africa,
Southern Europe, or wherever else the Caucasian and the Negro are in contact.
Intensity of civilization in its material phase is almost identical with
intensity of industrialism, and the black has not proved himself the industrial
equal of the white man. In the North of the United States, the Negro's cultural
inferiority has resulted in his practical elimination from the industries, and
apparently he is to suffer the same fate in the South. The Negro is generally
absent from the Southern textile factories. The whites of the South produce a
good deal more than half of the cotton. As the whites increase, the Negro in
the South will suffer gradual elimination from the industries and possibly even
from agriculture.
The Negro in the United States, or elsewhere, cannot compete with white
labor if Caucasian standards of remuneration are maintained. The Negro may
eliminate the white from a field of labor, but invariably such results are
obtained by substituting Negro standards of life.
Because of war-time cessation of immigration and the consequent scarcity of
labor, there was a demand for Negro labor even at white standards to pay. To
protect himself, the white laborer attempted to unionize the Negro. But when
the labor market is congested and there is not work for all, it is
inconceivable that the white man, who has excluded the Asiatic and who
vigorously opposes the incoming of the lower types of Europeans, will allow
high remuneration to millions of Negroes whereby they may sustain themselves
and increase their numbers and by so doing prevent just so many whites from
securing employment, thereby limiting the increase of white Americans.
Let us take time to survey the history of the Negro in American civilization
in order that we may better understand his present position.
A Dutch vessel brought twenty African Negroes to Jamestown, Virginia, and
sold them to the settlers there in the year of 1619. This was the beginning of
the slave trade and of slavery in British North America. As the development of
the colonies in the New World proceeded, it became a universal custom to secure
African Negroes from the slave traders and employ them as slaves in doing
menial service. The slave traffic became immensely profitable, and most of the
civilized nations took part in it. Wars were fought in Europe, and the choicest
fruit of victory was the privilege of monopolizing the slave traffic from the
coasts of Africa to the Americans.
Queen Elizabeth avowed that the wrath of an offended God would descend upon
the head of the doughty John Hawkins who, in spite of the Spanish monopoly,
succeeded in eluding the Spaniards and bringing Negroes to the New World. (John
R. Spears, The American Slave Trade, p. 15) But when the queen
discovered that the said John was successfully defying the Spanish and making
enormous profit from the slave traffic, she reversed her attitude and became
partner with that slaver, knighting him and furnishing him her ship, "The
Jesus," with which to augment his fleet. At a later date, she licensed
Dudley, Earl of Leicester (for twenty-five years a favorite of the queen), and
others to transport slaves to America. Certain English writers have affected to
believe that "Good Queen Bess" was not informed of Sir John Hawkins'
true activities, but the fact that the chapter under which Lord Dudley was to
operate expressly stipulated that slaves might be carried to America seems to
leave another item for them to consider in their effort to exempt Queen
Elizabeth from knowledge of and profit through the slave traffic.
The truth is that the white world believed it was doing the Negro a great
service by bringing him from savage Africa. The Negro's chief cultural
advancements have been wrought through his contact with the Caucasian. There is
agreement on this point among Negroes as well as among whites, New England had
early developed the shipping industry, and numerous vessels of the New
Englander soon entered competition with European nations in bringing slaves
from Africa to the Western colonies. It was not uncommon for the stern Puritan
to meet the incoming slavers and pray, thinking God for sending the heathen to
a land of Christianity.
Before the American Revolution, certain of the colonies had besought their
king to stay the slave traffic. There were men even at that early date who had
begun to appreciate what the presence of the Negro in the colonies would
eventually mean. But the English monarch denied the petition, for the reason
that vast British investments were in the trans-Atlantic trade, of which the
slave was the most profitable cargo. We saw in the previous chapter that the
British did not abolish the slave traffic until the year prior to the closing
of the American market (1808). The date of the closing of the United States to
the slaver had been known for some twenty years. (See Constitution of the
United STates, Art. 1, Sec. 9.)
At the time of the Revolution there were less than a million Negroes in the
Thirteen Colonies, and slavery was rapidly dying out in the New England
colonies. The New Englander was possessed of that highest human endowment,
creative genius, and this led to an industrialism which was to be the material
making of America. With the development of shipping and factories the Negro
became not only useless, but a burden.
Since the abolition of the slave traffic in 1808, the American Negro has
increased from one to eleven millions. If this increase remains normal we may
best illustrate the gravity of the Negro problem by pointing to the fact that
there are individuals now living who will witness the presence of thirty
million Negroes in the United States. It is quite possible that the
great-grand-children of some now living will witness the presence of more than
a hundred million Negroids in the New World.
The Negro has not increased in freedom as he did in slavery, for the reason
that the master enforced sanitation and regularity. In slavery, his increase
was greater than the Southern whites; since the Civil War, the Southern whites
have increased faster than the Negro. But the increase of the Southern white
has been great indeed, possibly as great as the percentage of increase of North
and West, though the South has received but a small proportion of the
immigrants to the United States.
It is a mistake to assert that the Negro will die out in America as a result
of influences which may now be detected. If the decline in the rate of increase
of the Negro implies ultimate extinction of that race, we may presume that the
white man will become extinct, for the same principles underlie the decrease of
both races. In those communities in which the Negro dwells with the Caucasian,
the latter must remedy the Negro's high death rate or else the diseases of the
Negro will be communicated to the whites, and the whites themselves be endangered
by their neglect of the Negro.
The Negro is not a dying race. He is bounteously fecund in a normal
environment. If he is to die out in America, it may be only as a result of
hopeless competition with the white race, in an environment of the white man's
making. The Negro is adaptable, and under a favorable environment he will have
the advantage in competition with a higher race; but it is conceivable that the
white man's diseases, communicated to the Negro, together with a possible
adverse economic situation, may retard the increase of the Negro, may even
exterminate him. We do not believe the white man will consciously destroy a
people whom he brought by force in his midst, even though this be possible.
Sanitation and economic opportunity will insure a normal increase among the
Negroes, and elemental justice requires that the white man afford the Negro
these advantages as long as he retains the Negro in his midst.
The most sanguine temperament cannot look upon the results of Caucasian
contact with colored races in the past and feel secure as to America's future.
Civilization has never survived intimate and prolonged contact with the colored
races, and, though the United States will outrank all other civilizations in
the successful preservation of the physical type form which civilization
proceeds, there are present in America implications as to the eventual
disintegration of this cultural stock. The American problem is not beyond the
possibility of permanent solution, but such successful solution will probably
depend upon the attitude of the present and the succeeding generation of
whites. America may successfully cope with her color problem when her colored
population become twice its present numerical strength, or three times its
present strength, but as the colored increase in number there is less
likelihood of America's attempting a radical and permanent address.
The nation should realize this and should be led to understand that the
permanency of the Caucasian race and its institutions depends upon measures
taken in the next few decades. Our danger possesses that seductive quality
which renders it invisible to the many and but dimly appreciated by the few.
Were there immediate peril to the flag, America would be in arms, ready for any
sacrifice of blood and treasure. But the danger is not from the threat of
military conquest, which would arouse all, but from the slow and
ill-appreciated disintegration, or replacement, of the physical type which has
made America great. We need those who can read and understand history and who
can visualize the future in America. Those who believe in and will spread the
cult of Caucasianism. Those who have become conscious that our civilization
will decline as the numerical proportion of the pure Caucasian is reduced. Those
who will sink sectionalism in national patriotism. Those who forget past
differences between North and South in a common purpose to preserve a common
civilization.
Let us take stock of the Caucasian assets in the impending struggle for
Caucasian permanency. Look to Latin America and to South Africa and behold the
inroads of miscegenation which threaten the permanency of these civilizations.
Are we not conscious that the "color line" in the United States has
preserved us, while other white nations in contact with the black and red races
are immediately imperiled as a result of blood admixture with these races?
Whites of these countries have freely interbred with colored peoples. An
incalculable debt we owe to our ancestors who preserved our race and culture in
the United States. Most of the Europeans who settled in Latin America betrayed
race and culture; our ancestors preserved us white through three hundred years
of race contact. Latin Americans bartered Caucasian birthright for temporary
gain. North Americans, surrounded by similar environment of equal intensity,
maintained race and institutions. Shall we not resolve to bequeath to our
posterity the race type and culture received from our fathers; the one unshorn
of its potentiality, the other undiminished in its splendor? We have survived
for three centuries, but thirty centuries are before us, and the future will
try us as the past has not.
The chief Caucasian asset in the struggle for permanency of civilization,
then, is race. There has been less miscegenation in the United States than
elsewhere in the world. Race we owe entirely to those who have lived before us.
Had they possessed less intelligence and feebler morals, we, at the present
time, would be a mixbreed people.
The second asset is the still prevailing color line, which is a national
ideal. Subsequent events have proved that the color line was in the hearts of
Americans even when the abolition of slavery appeared to carry with it the
abolition of the color line. The North, having less knowledge of the physical
and mental characteristics of the Negro, and subject for the time to an
idealism which was saving that portion of the white world which dwelt apart
from the Negro and which was intensified by sympathy for an enslaved race, did
preach "equality," but this equality did not extend to miscegenation.
Not only has there been a social color line throughout American history, but
it appears that a political color line has persisted as well. The satisfaction with
which the white North views the white South's elimination of the Negro from
politics can be understood when one grasps the fact that not the people of the
North, but a few powerful politicians, forced Negro control upon the South.
"The opposition to universal Negro suffrage was so
great throughout the North during the agitation of the question, which was
subsequently embodied in the Fifteenth Amendment, that, excluding the enforced
acquiescence of the Southern States, it was, when submitted to the people,
defeated in every state except Iowa and Minnesota," writes Thomas Nelson
Page, in The Negro: The Southerner's Problem.
Mr. Page, continuing, says (basing his data upon The
Fifteenth Amendment; An Account of its Enactment, by A. Caperton Braxton),
"In December, 1865, when the question of the
establishment of Negro suffrage in the District of Columbia was submitted to
the voters there, the vote stood, in Georgetown, 1 vote for and 812 votes
against the measure, and in Washington, 35 votes for and 6,521 votes against
the measure.
In September, 1865, the question
was submitted to the voters of the Territory of Colorado. The vote stood 476
for and 4,192 against it.
In June, 1866, the people of
Nebraska adopted a constitution which limited suffrage to the whites. In
October, 1867, the proposition for Negro suffrage in Ohio was voted down by
over 50,000 majority.
In Michigan, in 1868, when the
Republican Party carried by nearly 32,000 majority, the question of Negro
suffrage was voted down by nearly 39,000 majority.
In 1869, the people of New York
defeated the proposed measure by over 32,000 majority, and the Legislature of
that State rescinded a former act of previous Legislature, which had, by a
majority of two, ratified the Fifteenth Amendment.
On the 4th of March, 1869, in
Indiana, seventeen Senators and thirty-six Representatives resigned from the
Legislature to break a quorum and prevent the ratification of the amendment.
Every one of these, with a single exception, was subsequently reelected by the
people.
Meantime, under the
Reconstruction Acts,' the amendment was forced on the South. Seven of the
Southern Stats ratified it by the Negro vote, the whites being generally
disfranchised, while in three of them; Virginia, Mississippi and Texas,
ratification was assented to as a condition of readmission to the Union."
There were but few Negroes in Minnesota (246 adults,
according to the Census of 1870), while the State of Iowa had 1,542 Negroes as
compared to 289,162 whites. Yet in these states Negro suffrage was carried by
narrow margins. Certain it is that the whites of the United States have never
favored giving the Negro joint control in the civilization which proceeds from
the Caucasian.
There were some whites in the North who advocated miscegenation, as there
were some whites in the South who practiced it. After three centuries of
contact, one-third, or less, of the Negro population is mixed with the blood of
the whites. If we compare the United States with other nations which have been
in contact with colored races, we shall be greatly encouraged. But few of the
present number of mixbreeds are the product of a first crossing with the white
race of the South. The mulatto, the quadroon, the octoroon, and the still
lighter colored, have injected into the Negro race an overwhelming proportion
of the Caucasian blood which his race manifests.
The situation is not hopeless at present. But will not history repeat itself
in the United States? We know the long continued dwelling together of blacks
and whites during the past sixty centuries has had but one ending;
amalgamation. Changing social conditions, civil wars, invading armies without a
sense of the color line, the lust of the white man, the mix-breeds' clamor for
equality; such influences, throughout the centuries, have nullified every
attempt of the white race to remain white when dwelling with the colored.
The color line as applied in the United States accredits to the white race
only those who are purely white, while to the black race is given those who are
partly white. In this respect the color line, as interpreted by the Untied
States, stands separate and distinct from the "color line" as
interpreted by other white people. The nearest approach to identical
interpretation is found in the former German colonies, but there the
half-breeds are few, and it remains for these possessions to be tested by
centuries.
Australia and New Zealand, while forbidding the incoming of colored races,
do not apply a strict color line to those now there.
While the color line as a national ideal in the United States has never been
transgressed, it has been departed from by a few white individuals in each
community and over so long a period of time that the cumulative effects of its
transgression is destined to eventually weaken its application throughout the
nation. First crosses and unions of the partly white with the full black and
with the full white have resulted in the production of approximately three
million mixbreeds, ranging through all shades of complexion from the near white
to the near black. This mixbreed population is a result of a total of three
centuries of race contact. Numerically it furnishes indisputable evidence that
the color line has been, from the first, a national ideal. The average white
has not contributed to the mixing of the races, but has held sternly aloof,
through miscegenation has ever appealed to the fundamental instincts and could
have been a nation-wide phenomenon at a word from the white man.
When contemplating the American mulatto, the white American may well realize
that his future is imperiled by the mixbreed; but at the same time he should
take what consolation he may from the knowledge that during the period of time
that the mulatto has been produced, certain other white communities have been almost
obliterated by miscegenation. Race, the color line, and knowledge of the
results to the white man of his centuries of dealing with the colored, may be
said to be the chief assets of the white in the effort to secure a white
America.
What then are some of the disadvantages confronting Caucasian civilization
in the United States?
The chief disadvantage lies in the failure of the all-powerful whites
to visualize the future. The greater number of Americans do not live
near enough to the Negro to understand the limitations of the Negro and to
realize that he has not had, and cannot have, a part in progressive
civilization. The Negro himself does profit from his enforced dwelling with the
Caucasian, but such profit is at the expense of the Caucasian. The future holds
before us an America filled to overflowing with a population which is to be
pressed for room and food. There will be a white man for every job in America.
When that times comes, and it will not be far distant, the Negro millions will
eliminate just so many white millions. But the depressing influence of the
Negro upon future America will be dealt with in another chapter.
We have seen that the American, by reason of race ideal and law, has mixed
but little with the alien race within his midst. This mixture almost in its
entirety has been illegal. The mulatto element results from unlawful unions
between whites and blacks. The mulatto, in turn, willingly submits to the
sub-normal white, and the result is a quadroon. The quadroon seeks a white
mate, and the result is an octoroon, one-eighth Negro. Here is the danger! The
octoroons and the yet whiter Negroids are bucking the color line. They
constitute the distinguished "Negroes" of America that fanatical and
untruthful whites exhibit as specimens of Negro stock and culture. The law of
heredity will constitute some of these mixbreeds, Caucasian-like in appearance
and in race instinct. These will tower over the Negro and will approach the
white in mentality and in culture. It is this mixbreed element in the United
States, supplemented by Negroes form South Europe, Latin America, and the
British West Indies, coming to our shores in ever-increasing numbers, who
constitute the immediate peril to the white race and the institutions of
civilization. The near-whites are bucking the color-line and making good in
every state in the American Union. The North, the South, the East and the West
are suffering these aggressive Negroids to enter white society and to inject
the blood of Africa into Caucasian circles. The vaunted race pride of the
Southerner has more than once succumbed to the mulattress, while beyond the
South the mulatto's program is still more easily realized. The near-white is a
cancer that will eat deeper and deeper into the heart of the white race. Following
upon the triumph of the near-white, the near-Negro will enter, finding a people
who having received the near-white in martial equality to be less severe in
repulsing the near-Negro.
While the purity of the white race has been the national ideal throughout
American history, it is not the nation as a whole, but that part of the nation
in immediate contact with the Negro that has been submitted to a rigid test of
this ideal. The South emerges from three hundred years of immediate contact
with the Negro and is white. This is the greatest miracle in the record of the
contact of races. Faithful to race and institutions, the South now presents
twenty-five million Saxon sons and daughters for the nation's use in peace or
war.
The abuse meted to the Southerners in the days of the great illusion of the
equality of races by English writers, and by not a few of the North, leaves no
rancor in Southern memory when the South calls attention to her white sons and
daughters. The doctrine of equality of races angered and hurt the Southerners,
as it did the British and Dutch colonials, but the consciousness that they were
preserving race and culture steeled them during the period of acrimony and
defeat.
Europeans, instead of finding a mulatto South, as they find a mixbreed Latin
America, are struck with the contrast.
Henderson is never better satisfied than when praising
the physical type of the Southerners and their Saxon ideals. He calls them
"Anglo-Saxons of the purest strain." (See Lieut. Col. (British Army),
C.F.R. Henderson's Life of Stonewall Jackson, v.1, p. 93.)
Keane, the ethnologist, speaks of
their "magnificent physique." ( A. H. Keane, Ethnology, p.
373.)
Even Johnston, the negrophilist,
does them the honor of saying there is in the Southerner "no evidence of
race decay." (He refers to the Southern inhabitants of the Mississippi
Valley. See Sir H.H. Johnston, The Negro in the New World, p.435.)
Von Bernhardi expresses high
appreciation of the South and its heroic struggle in the Civil War. (See Germany
and the Next War, by F. Von Bernhardi.)
Schultz (American writer) says
the Civil War was not over in three months because "the Southerners were
pure Saxons." (Race or Mongrel, by Alfred F. Schultz.)
James Bryce and other Englishmen write of the Saxon's sense
of race superiority and of his maintenance of the color-line. In every instance
of which the writer is aware, the English or American historians who seek to
show the Saxon's sense of race superiority when dwelling with a colored race
draw their illustrations from the history of the South.
The immensely rich East and West, with their highly developed industrial
civilization, due in great extent to the use of European capital, receiving
millions of immigrants, possessing the wealth of the nation and holding the
reins of government, have been hardly conscious prior to the past decade of the
latent possibilities of the Southern States. By reason of a sparse white
population and an always high percentage of Negroes and by defeat in the Civil
War, which defeat carried with it the Reconstruction, the Southern States,
though immensely rich in natural resources and blessed by a splendid climate,
have lagged behind the rest of the nation in wealth and many other expressions
of civilization. In 1860, the Souhtern whites, by reason of their vast landed
possessions, were worth more per capita than the whites of the North. The Civil
War reduced them below the North in per capita wealth, the Reconstruction
brought them to the border of bankruptcy. Staggering to their feet under these
burdens, they had hardly reached solvency when the nation-wide panic of the
early nineties swept away the material progress of a generation. Recovering
gradually, the South by 1900 had entered its present era of prosperity.
When it was ascertained that the South had recovered from the Reconstruction
and was a safe place for investments, the wealth of the North began to pour
into its treasuries and, that which is far more important than wealth,
Northerners themselves came to the South, and the land profited greatly by
their superior knowledge in the industries and agriculture. No Northern man has
endeared himself to the people of the South in such degree as the late Dr.
Seaman A. Knapp. In the proceedings of the Fourth Annual Convention of the
Southern Commercial Congress, Nashville, Tennessee, 1912, a session was
arranged as a memorial to this distinguished benefactor of the South. As
organizer and director of the farmer's co-operative demonstration work. Dr.
Knapp contributed more tot he present prosperity of the South than has any
other individual. How the Southerner will welcome the coming of the Northerner
who demonstrates that he is interested in the Caucasian culture of the South
was clearly set forth in the addresses of representative Southerners who were
in agreement that Dr. Knapp was the most capable friend that the Southern
farmer has ever had.
If we consider the extraordinary hatred shown by the Southerner to those
form the North who came to the South some fifty years ago and taught the theory
of equality of Negro and Caucasian, and compare that attitude with the praise
given by representative Southerners to "The Schoolmaster of
Agriculture," we cannot but draw the conclusion that the so-called sectionalism
of the Southerner is circumscribed by the Caucasianism of the Southerner. The
address of the Arkansas representative affirmed that the State of Arkansas owes
a debt of $200,000,000 to Dr. Knapp, while an even more significant
understanding of the character of this great man is found in the address of the
Georgia delegate who said,
"Seaman A. Knapp came as a stranger into our
Southland, but when his great soul passed over the river into the shadows
beyond, he left behind him the loving memories and grateful hearts of the
entire people of Dixie."
The South is credited with high ingenuity in war and in
politics, but such ingenuity will not of itself entitle Southerners to rank
with other Saxons. The thing that strikes the European and Northern visitor
most when they journey through the ex-slave states is the comparative lack of
industries. Matters have changed somewhat of late years, and the South is
taking on new life, but it would be futile to prophesy that the Southern States
will be able, under present circumstances, to overtake the North and West. This
cannot be, for the millions of Africans in the Southern States will render it
impossible.
The difficulty of the South is not that it is deficient in industrial
capacity, but that Southern conditions make difficult an industrial display.
Suppose that the Southern proportions of blacks and whites should exist in the
North! Diminish the creative element there by more than thirty percent and
substitute in its stead a people not only non-creative, but incapable of
seconding the progress of the creative element. Is it conceivable that the
intensity of Northern civilization could be maintained? The history of the
contact of races shows that it could not.
If we keep in mind the relative sparsity of population, the chaos growing
out of the Civil War and the Reconstruction, together with the world-wide
experience that the intensity of civilization is in inverse ratio to the
numerical proportion of Negroes in the population, we shall have a true
explanation of the backwardness of the Southern States.
The South will never be able to cope with the white North. The South is
doomed to material and spiritual inferiority. This is a depressing conclusion,
but no other is possible. What has it availed the South to show industrial
capacity? Creative ingenuity and initiative the Southerner has in common with
other Teutonic peoples. The Southerner built the first railroad in America, the
first street car line, the first and second steamboats, the first ironclad, the
first submarine; invented The first reaper; was first to apply electricity to
street car locomotion; was first to municipally build and operate a street car
service; inaugurated municipal government by commission, an innovation that is
spreading beyond the borders of America; gave to America and to the world the
public free school which has become the glory of modern civilization; lastly,
but, in the opinion of some, not the least, constructed the first golf links in
the Western World. The South could create, but the South could not develop its
own creations as the white North has done. Teutonic genius is in the race, but
the race has been imperiled by the jungle.
It is necessary to remind the people of the great white North that the
portion of their race, which is by virtue of circumstance custodian of
civilization in the Southern States, has demonstrated that it possesses
cultural capacities like unto themselves, but that "Experience in all
parts of the world shows that the presence of an inferior race in large numbers
tends constantly to lower the standards of the dominant race," and,
"If he (the American Negro) could be eliminated form the Southern States,
their future would be much brighter than it is now." (Address of Ellsworth
Huntington, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Geography, Yale, given at Clark
University, 1913. See Latin America, published by Clark University,
p.368.)
The South has been submitted to the acid test of the white ideal. The South
has preserved the color-line and the color-line has maintained a white South.
The color-line has preserved the white race, but the color-line will not make
the South a great industrial civilization. Civilization proceeds from and is
dependent upon the white man, and the white American surely must have an
intense interest in remedying matters in the South. The Negro is not, save in a
restricted sense, the Southerner's problem. He is a national problem.
In a speech delivered in the Senate August 7, 1916, Senator James K.
Vardaman of Mississippi, speaking of the Negro problem, said: "We realize
that nothing definite looking to the solution of the race problem can be
expected without National aid...It is a problem which the Nation made, and the
Nation alone can solve it." This is true. It is the greatest problem of
our civilization, and constitutes the "only problem beyond which we cannot
see." (Grover Cleveland).
When tyranny, backed by immense power, attempted to intimidate the Northern
colonies, the South, though not immediately concerned in the struggle, cried,
"Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle?"
(Patrick Henry) We know the result. The South made common cause with their
endangered "brethren" and the American nation sprang into existence.
Race and culture are imperiled in the South as they never were in the North.
There are millions of Southerners who wait for the powerful white North to say,
"Our brethren are in the field! Why stand we here idle?"
For more than two years the writer was employed as an underground workman in
the diamond and gold mines in South Africa. His lengthy experience with the
white workingmen of South Africa enabled him to enter into the spirit of their
problems. The problems arising from the white man's contact with the Negro are
similar throughout the world. The differences are those of degree, not kind.
The white laboring class of South Africa is extremely hard pressed by reason of
disastrous competition with the low standards of the colored, who outnumber the
whites five to one. If the writer has been seemingly severe in criticism of the
institutions of South Africa, it is because his living there identified him
with the present status and the needs of the white laboring class upon which
the civilization depends. The white workingmen will have to arouse themselves
if civilization is to continue in South Africa. They need to realize that their
present danger is a man-made danger and can be remedied by human agency.