1040 OF THE HUMAN PAMILY, AND THEIR MUTUAL RELATIONS. 



originally different, cannot produce a mixed race which shall possess the capa- 

 bility of perpetuating itself; whilst the union of varieties has a tendency to 

 produce a race superior in energy and fertility to its parents. The application 

 of this principle to the Human races leaves no doubt with respect to their 

 specific unity ; for, as is well known, not only do all the races of Men breed 

 freely with each other ; but the mixed race is generally superior in physical 

 development, and in tendency to rapid multiplication, to either of the parent 

 stocks ; so that there is much reason to believe that, in many countries, the 

 mixed race between the Aborigines and European colonizers will ultimately 

 become the dominant power in the community. This is especially the case in 

 India, South America, and Polynesia. 



1048. The question of Psychical conformity or difference among the Races 

 of Mankind is one which has a most direct bearing upon the question of their 

 specific unity or diversity ; but it has an importance of its own, even greater 

 than that which it derives from this source. For, as has been recently argued 

 with great justice and power, 1 the real Unity of Mankind does not lie in the 

 consanguinity of a common descent, but has its basis in the participation of 

 every race in the same moral nature, and in the community of moral rights 

 which hence becomes the privilege of all. "This is a bond which every man 

 feels more and more, the farther he advances in his intellectual and moral cul- 

 ture, and which in this development is continually placed upon higher and 

 higher ground ; so much so, that the physical relation arising from a common 

 descent is finally lost sight of, in the consciousness of the higher moral obliga- 

 tions." It is in these obligations that the moral rights of men have their 

 foundation; and thus, "while Africans have the hearts and consciences of human 

 beings, it could never be right to treat them as domestic cattle or as wild-fowl, 

 if it were ever so abundantly demonstrated that their race was but an improved 

 species of ape, and ours a degenerate kind of god." The Psychical comparison 

 of the various Races of Mankind is really, therefore, in a practical point of view, 

 the most important part of the whole investigation ; but it has been, neverthe- 

 less, the one most imperfectly pursued, until the inquiry was taken up by Dr. 

 Prichard. The mass of evidence which he has accumulated on this subject, 

 however, leaves no reasonable doubt that no more " impassable barrier" really 

 exists between the different races with respect to this, than in regard to any of 

 those points of ostensible diversity which have been already considered ; the 

 variations in the positive and relative development of their respective psychical 

 powers and tendencies, not being greater, either in kind or degree, than those 

 which present themselves between individuals of our own or of any other race, 

 by some members of which a high intellectual and moral standard has been 

 attained. The tests by which we recognize the claims of the outcast and de- 

 graded of our own or of any other " highly-civilized" community, to a common 

 humanity, are the same as those by which we should estimate the true relation 

 of the Negro, the Bushman, or the Australian, to the cultivated European. If, 

 on the one hand, we admit the influence of want, ignorance, and neglect, in 

 accounting for the debasement of the savages of our own great cities and 

 if we witness the same effects occurring under the same conditions among the 

 Bushmen of Southern Africa ( 1058) we can scarcely hesitate in admitting 

 that the long-continued operation of the same agencies has had much to do with 

 the psychical as well as the physical deterioration of the Negro, Australian, 

 and other degraded savages. So, on the other hand, if we cherish the hope 

 that the former, so far from being irreclaimable, may at least be brought up to 

 the standard from which they have degenerated, by means adapted to develop 



1 See the "New Quarterly Preview," No. xv., p. 131 ; and an Article by Prof. Agassiz 

 in the "Christian Examiner," Boston (N. E.), 1850. 



