THE HAL]?-BREET). 13 



advocacy of intermarriage, as a solntion of a difRcult problem,' by professed friends of the 

 African race. The Lite "Wendell riiillips declared himself an amalgamatiouisl to the utmost 

 extent, and said that his main hope lay " in that sublime mingling of the races, which is 

 God's own method of civilizing and elevating the world." Bishop Haven, with still greater 

 fervour of faith, felt confident that Americans would one day see " Helen's beauty in a 

 brow of Egypt." "We shall say:" he said in one of his sermons, " AVhat a rii'h complexion 

 is that brown skin ! "- In connection with the good bishop's faith in the elimination of 

 prejudice among his countrymen, it may not be out of place to recall what Henry M. 

 Stanley has recorded, in the second volume of " Through the Dark Continent," as to the 

 effect produced on him by the sight of white men after being for years accu.stomed to the 

 dusky hue of African tribesmen. "Proceeding a little fu.rther," he says, " we stopped, 

 and in a short time I was face to face with four white — ay, truly white men ! As I looked 

 into their faces, I blushed to find that I was wondering at their paleness. Poor pagan 

 Africans — Rwoma of Uzinja, and man-eating tribes of the Livingstone ! The whole secret 

 of their wonder and curiosity Hashed upon me at once. What arrested the twanging bow 

 and the deadly trigger of the cannibals ? What, but the weird pallor of myself and Frank ! 

 In the same manner the pale faces of the Embomma merchants gave me the slightest sus- 

 picion of an involuntary shiver. The pale colour, after so long gazing on rich black and 

 richer bronze, had something of an unaccountable ghastliness. I could not divest myself 

 of the feeling that they must be sick ; yet as I compare their complexions to what I now 

 view, I should say they were olive, sunburnt, dark." Indirectly, perhaps, there is some- 

 thing in these words which explains why the slaveholder was often more generous in his 

 sentiments towards the negro than the philanthropist, whose love for him was purely of 

 an abstract nature. 



The ultimate destiny of the black, as of the red race, in North America, is a question of 

 deep interest and importance on which a great deal has recently been written. By the 

 census of 1880 the coloured population of the United States was (3,5'7'7,49'7, that of the whites 

 being 43,402,108. During the ten years from IBTO to 1880 the ratio of increase in the 

 former (348 per cent.) was larger than it had been during any decade except one, that from 

 1800 to 1810. The fact that the ratio of increase of the white population during the period 

 from 18T0 to 1880 was only 292 per cent., according to the census, naturall)^ occasioned 

 comment and even alarm. In the Popular Science Monthly for February, 1883, Prof. E. W. 



' " Is it ncit -n-onderful ?"' writes Mr. G. W. Cable, " A hundred years we have been fearing to do entirely right 

 lest something wrong should come of it ; fearing to give the black man an equal chance with us in the race of life 

 lest we might have to grapple with the vast, vague afrite of amalgamation; and in all this hundred years, with the 

 enemies of slavery getting from us such names as negrophiles, negro-worshippers and miscegenationists ; and 

 while we were claiming to hold ourselves rigidly separate from the lower race in obedience to a natal in.stinct which 

 excommunicated them both socially and civilly ; just in proportion to the rigor, the fierceness, and the injustice 

 with which this excommunication from the common rights of man has fallen upon the darker race, has amal- 

 gamation taken place." And, endeavouring to account for the almost entire non-existenco of amalgamation in the 

 negrophile North, ]\Ir. Cable asks and answers : " How have they been kept apart ? By law ? By fierce conven- 

 tionality ? By instinct ? No ! It was because they did twi follow instinct, but the better dictates of reason and 

 the ordinary natural preferences of like for like." " The Silent South," in the Century, Sept.,lS85. But may it not 

 also be true that familiarity with the negro in the South, even while it bred contempt, had also a tendency to 

 conquer that Caucasian fastidiousness which prevented race-interfusion in the North? Since the war the antipathy 

 consequent on political jealousies and altered race-relations would prove a barrier to intercourse in the South. 



^ Quoted in Winchell's Preadamites, p. 81. 



