482 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



negro feels an instinctive admiration for southern white people, in pref- 

 erence to unemotional northerners, so the race has in the course of 

 generations reacted more spontaneously, and perhaps more wholesomely, 

 to the vivacious Latin temperament than to the sterner Teuton type. 

 The smaller degree of race friction in the Latin colonies may point to a 

 possible modification of world policy in the white man's growing problem 

 of dealing with black races in Africa and Australasia. 14 



This tendency of the negro to take on the psychic tone of the 

 dominant culture may have far-reaching results in Africa itself. Weale 

 is convinced that if the African negro shall be Mohammedanized the fate 

 of the white man's empire in that continent will be sealed. From the 

 Arabs the negro would acquire an aggressive, war-like spirit that would 

 ultimately lead to his mastery of his own continent. If, on the other 

 hand, the Africans are christianized they will remain docile. But, as 

 already noted, the negro temperament is little adapted to aggressiveness 

 or independent activity. It is therefore more probable that he will 

 develop in civilization, if he develops at all, on the lines of the European 

 peoples who are pressing on the more remote portions of Africa with 

 ever-increasing persistence. 



Wherever the blacks are massed in undisturbed possession of the 

 soil, their contact with the whites is in the nature of independent group 

 antagonism. In tropical Africa the true negro is at home, and, so far as 

 can now be foreseen, the white man can rule only as an outsider without 

 constituting any appreciable element in the social population. But on 

 the fringes of the continent the situation is very similar to that in the 

 United States, where a ruling race is settled upon the same soil and is 

 capable of self-perpetuation. But even in temperate South Africa it is 

 possible that large political units, wholly black, may survive. The 

 South African black, except in Cape Colony, is not at present granted 

 equal political rights, but if he continues to progress in intelligence as 

 he has recently done his demand for political and social equality must 

 become exceedingly strong, as it has in the United States; and the 

 struggle for equality will of itself be a means of developing a fixed sense 

 of race separateness which must long make the color question a sore 

 spot in South African politics. 



In the Australian commonwealth the color problem exhibits a most 

 peculiar and interesting phase. The aboriginal inhabitants scarcely 

 figure in the question at all. There can, for the present, be little idea of 

 their active participation in organized social interests, both by reason of 

 their small numbers and because of their absolute lack of capacity. It 



14 Sir H. H. Johnston points out that the hold which the French secured on 

 the negroes of the Windward Island and of Dominica during the period of their 

 occupancy was deeper than that which the English have been able to acquire 

 during the period of British rule. "The Negro in the New World," pp. 233- 

 234 and 306-309. 



