4 8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



than in the British West Indies and there are fewer evidences of social 

 friction. 



While the antipathy of white toward black is the most pronounced 

 phase of color conflict, prejudice against the blacks is not confined to 

 Europeans and Americans. The Chinese, the most cosmopolitan of 

 peoples, sometimes exhibit a striking aversion to taking black wives or 

 concubines, but manifest no particular aversion to the native women of 

 Java or Borneo. East Indian laborers imported into the British West 

 Indies and British Guiana have generally refused all intercourse with 

 negro women. The American Indians have sometimes interbred with 

 blacks, but in British Guiana they are reported to despise the negroes 

 and to have little intercourse with them. 9 



It is sometimes asserted that a rigid enforcement of the color line 

 in the tropics would leave the two races isolated in an intractable antip- 

 athy. Sir Sidney Olivier, governor of Jamaica, has argued from this 

 that a middle class of mixed stock serves as a useful buffer between white 

 and black. He says : 



Where, therefore, we have created and are developing a community of 

 diverse races, I can not, in the light of British West Indian conditions, admit 

 that interbreeding is necessarily an evil. I think, rather, that where we have 

 such a community we had better make up our minds not only not to despise the 

 offspring of illicit interbreeding that invariably takes place in such conditions, 

 but make our account for a certain amount of legitimate and honorable inter- 

 breeding and to look upon it, not as an evil, but as an advantage. 10 



But such interbreeding, Sir Sidney maintains, should invariably 

 come about by the marriage of white men with colored women. There 

 is a good biological reason for this, but the primary consideration is the 

 racial welfare of the whites. Whatever the good qualities of the negro, 

 and Sir Sidney sees more of them than most of his fellow whites, he 

 nevertheless thinks that 



the white races are now in fact by far the further advanced in effectual 

 human development, and it would be expedient on this account alone that their 

 maternity should be economized to the utmost. A woman may be the mother of 

 a limited number of children and our estimate of the number advisable is con- 

 tracting; 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 colored or mixed race. The offspring of such breeding, 

 whether legitimate or illegitimate, is, from the point of view of efficiency, 

 an acquisition to the community and, under favorable conditions, an advance 

 on the pure-bred African. 11 



A mixed stock, however, while it may lessen the actual clash between 

 the two extreme types in a community, does not necessarily diminish the 

 totality of race antagonism, and may augment it. For the hybrid, instead 



9 Johnston, "The Negro in the New World," pp. 331, 332 and 334. 



10 Olivier, ' < White Capital and Colored Labor, ' ' pp. 39-40. 

 u Hid., pp. 37 38. 



