576 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



exclusive of skin-pigment, between a Chinese and Caucasian as between 

 a Negro and Caucasian. Similarly with respect to a number of Cau- 

 casian-Japanese crosses. There is no instinctive revulsion against such 

 alliance; hence they are frequently made by superior individuals; and 

 the offspring are of the same superior type, without evidence of de- 

 terioration. Indeed, it frequently happens that an unusually fortunate 

 combination of the best racial characteristics of both races appears in 

 an offspring of such cross, resulting in an extraordinarily endowed hu- 

 man being. 



I admit the general inferiority of black-white offspring. Defective 

 half-breeds are too prevalent and obtruding to permit denying the ap- 

 parently predetermined result of such crosses. But I emphatically 

 deny that the result is inherent in the simple fact of cross-breeding. 

 There are not a few very striking exceptions among my own acquaint- 

 ances. Absolutely the best mulatto family I have ever known traces its 

 ancestry back on both the maternal and paternal side to high-grade 

 white grandfathers and pure-type negro grandmothers. The reason for 

 the frequently inferior product of such crosses is that the better ele- 

 ments of both races under ordinary conditions of easy mating with their 

 own type feel an instinctive repugnance to intermarriage. Under these 

 usual circumstances a white man who stoops to mating with a colored 

 woman, or a colored woman who will accept a white man, are already of 

 quite inferior type. One would not expect superior offspring from such 

 parents, if it concerned horses or dogs. Why should we expect the 

 biologically impossible in the case of man? If the parents are of good 

 type, so will be the offspring. And even with the handicap of frequently 

 degraded white ancestry, the mulatto of our country, as in Jamaica, 

 forms the most intelligent and potentially useful element of our col- 

 ored population. 



The fact then is established, beyond all possibility of disproof, it 

 seems to me, that a negro-white cross does not inherently mean de- 

 generacy; and that the mulatto, measured by present-day standards of 

 Caucasian civilization, from economic and civic standpoints, is an ad- 

 vance upon a pure negro. In further support of the potency of even a 

 relatively remote white ancestry may be cited the almost unique in- 

 stance of the Moses of the colored race, Booker T. Washington. As one 

 mingles day by day with colored people of all grades and shades, one is 

 impressed with the significance of even small admixtures of Caucasian 

 blood. What elements of hope or menace lie hidden in these mulatto 

 millions ? How can they help to solve or confuse the " problem " ? 



Let us see clearly what we are dealing with. What are the large dis- 

 tinctive characteristics of the three types, white, mulatto and black, 

 forming our civic and social complex ? As to the negro — I quote from 

 Le Bon: 



