PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMIT OF EUGENICS 395 



"Kace" is the cheap explanation tyros offer for any collective trait that 

 they are too stupid or too lazy to trace to its origin in the physical environment, 

 the social environment or historical conditions. 14 



In this discussion I would like to substitute " heredity " for " race " 

 and let the quotation read : 



' ' Heredity ' ' is the cheap explanation tyros offer for any collective trait that 

 they are too stupid or too lazy to trace to its origin in the physical environment, 

 the social environment or historical conditions. 



When in a Battle Creek restaurant I saw the sign " Colored Patron- 

 age not Desired," my sympathy for the Negro enabled me to feel some- 

 thing as he feels, and I can assure you that the depressing force of a 

 public opinion that approves of such discrimination is more influential 

 on the race expression than a very large variation in the germ plasm. 

 W. E. B. DuBois has described this form from the inside in his " Souls 

 of Black Folk " where he says : 



They must perpetually discuss the Negro problem, must live, move, have 

 their being in it, and interpret all else in its light or darkness. From the double 

 life that every American Negro must live as a Negro and as an American, as 

 swept on by the current of the twentieth century while struggling in the eddies 

 of the fifteenth — from this must arise a powerful self-consciousness and a moral 

 hesitancy which is almost fatal to self-confidence. . . . To-day the young Negro 

 of the South who would succeed can not be frank and outspoken, but rather he 

 is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly. . . . His real thoughts, 

 his real aspirations must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticize, he must, 

 not complain. Patience and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, re- 

 place impulse, manliness and courage. ... At the same time, through books: 

 and periodicals, discussions and lectures he is intellectually awakened. In th§ 

 conflict, some sink, some rise." 15 



When we remember that more than ten per cent, of the pop- 

 ulation of the United States belong to this class, we can feel that 

 human progress can not proceed without limit until we have modi- 

 fied our race mores. The sad thing about it is the popular view that 

 the race question is to be explained on biological grounds, and that any 

 race except that to which we have been born is on a lower stage of evo- 

 lution. We condemn them without trial. Wherever there is white con- 

 tact with Indians the whole attitude is permeated with the idea that 

 there is no good Indian but a dead one, and their efforts to change their 

 conditions always comes face to face with this prejudice. Much of our 

 immigrant problem is of the same sort. We condemn them in toto, as 

 the brigands of Calabria were condemned in the quotation given. Lord 

 Byron expressed the force of other men's opinion when he said : 



I made men think I was what I was not, and I became what they thought me. 



We can not escape the great and unjustified discouragement that 



will come to those we suspect do not belong to the race-horse type. The 



door of hope is closed to them, while the race horses can not fail to get 



14 "Social Psychology," p. 3. 



"" Souls of Black Folk," p. 203, McClurg, 1903. 



