86 HEREDITY AND SOCIETY 



modern states. The conventions of a social class that 

 will not expose its daughters to hardship, cheerfully 

 acquiesce in conditions that condemn white men either 

 to enforced celibacy, to marriage with women of a lower 

 social standing or to association with native women. 

 Meanwhile from many of the women who have re- 

 mained at home in circumstances of ease and security 

 we hear preached the comforting doctrine of the equality 

 of the sexes. 



The problem of the half-caste population may yet 

 become the most serious obstacle to progress that 

 humanity has to face. Both in India and in the 

 United States of America, it is growing within measur- 

 able distance of being an urgent political question. In 

 matters of religion, of education, of social standing, of 

 intermarriage affecting them, we have to take action in 

 the dark ; not knowing what conditions are appropriate 

 for the best development of an organism to which 

 probably neither of the parental environments are 

 applicable. All the knowledge we possess, all our 

 innermost instincts and prejudices, counsel us against 

 the creation of the half-breed and the mongrel, and 

 yet many of our present social conventions lead in- 

 evitably to the increase of the type whose existence 

 we deplore. 



It matters nothing in the end, when the men of an 

 imperial and colonizing nation go out into strange 

 lands and are unaccompanied by their women-folk, 

 whether, as in Spain, the women stay behind and go 

 into convents, or whether, as in England, they remain 

 at home to swell the ranks of the celibate teachers, 

 inspectors, and agitators. The result, as far as the 



