TEE MULATTO 581 



with mulatto would be a very real incentive to serious efforts for devel- 

 opment on the part of the negro. The logical conclusion may follow in 

 the course of the ages. At any rate from present indications our hope 

 lies in the mulatto. A wise statesmanship and rational patriotism will 

 make every effort to conserve him, and imbue him with his mission in 

 the interests of the brotherhood of a better man. The problem seems 

 possible of solution only as the mulatto will undertake it, with the 

 earnest help of the white. 



But Le Bon tells us the cross-breed has no " soul." Surely a soul- 

 less race would be a world calamity! But these words are poetical, 

 not scientific. A mulatto has no more lost his soul in being hybrid or 

 a descendant thereof than I should if I were to take up my abode in 

 Fiji. This would surely hurt. But I should be no less a man for all 

 my mental pain. The experience might conceivably work to the expan- 

 sion of my soul. The mulatto is as loyal to his country, his friends 

 and his conscience, according to his lights, as a "white" man. He is 

 just as sensitive. He feels as deeply, experiences the same thrills of 

 happiness as other rational human beings. He has a soul in as true a 

 sense as the word is used by Le Bon as any man. He has more truly a 

 soul in this sense than the " thoroughbred " professor who has lost his 

 childhood's religious faith. Olivier says on this point : 



Whereas the pure race in its prime knows one man only, itself, and one 

 God, its own will, the hybrid is incapable of this exclusive racial pride, and 

 inevitably becomes aware that there is something, the something that we call 

 human, which is greater than the one race or the other, and something in the 

 nature of spiritual power, that is stronger than national God or will. What 

 were, to each separate race, final forms of truth, become, when competing in the 

 focus of our human consciousness, mutually destructive, and each recognizably 

 insufficient. Yet the hybrid finds himself still very much alive, and not at all 

 extinguished with the collapse of his racial theories (p. 25, italics my own). 



The truth is that the hybrid finds himself alive and human, with all 

 that this signifies in terms of capacity for soul development. The 

 pure-bred has no better initial equipment. In the matter of human 

 fundamentals they come to differ only as a different nurture plays upon 

 a very similar human nature. There surely are no real data for the 

 support of Le Bon's notion that contrary heredities sap the vitality of 

 hybrids and leave them barren of soul. 



The last point is equally difficult, but, like the preceding two, not 

 forbidding. It may be briefly more or less summarily disposed of. 

 The negro can not afford to surrender aught granted him under the 

 constitution. It would be harmful to both colored and whites at this 

 stage of progress to have such alteration achieved as would give the 

 governing powers the free hand exercised by the English in their treat- 

 ment of the negro of Jamaica. A comparison of conditions as between 



