444 "^HE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the parent stocks, and because there are almost none of the class of "poor whites" who constitute so large an element of the prob- lem in the southern states of America. The position of the half- caste is usually an unfortunate one. The consciousness of his superiority to the more primitive stock raises a barrier against sympathetic co-operation on that side,^^ while on the side of the dominant race he finds no willingness to grant social equality. If he is not more depraved in morals than either of the parent races he at least has acquired the reputation of being so.^^ Unless the two extremes continue to cross, the mixed breed tends to disap- pear, either by marrying back into the darker race or by approach- ing the whites through conscious sexual selection, lighter mates being always preferred in successive generations. Hoffman's in- vestigations show that in Jamaica itself mixed marriages are on the decline and that there is a well-marked tendency among the population to revert to the African type.^^ In some districts in the southern states likewise the growing race antipathy of the whites manifests itself in a decrease of intercourse with negroes. Bruce believes that this is already resulting not only in a rapid decline in the number of mulattoes, but in a perceptible return of the colored population to the original African type. "As his skin darkens," continued Bruce, "in its return to the tint which distinguishes that of his remote ancestors, the prospect of the whites and blacks lawfully mixing their blood fades to the thin- nest shadow of probability."^^ In India the Eurasians constitute
- My colleague, Professor C. H. Eigenmann, informs me of a curious in-
stance of half-caste pride which came to his notice in British Guiana. A white man who had a family by a black woman proposed late in life to marry her in order to legitimize the children. The last-named objected on the ground that marriage with a white man would give the black mother a social position which they could not tolerate.
- Darwin quotes Livingstone's well-known remark that the half-breeds of the
Zambesi district were more cruel than the Portuguese themselves. The natives had a saying: "God made the white man, and God made the black, but the devil made the half-breed." — Darwin, Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, II, 21.
"^American Statistical Association, IV, 198.
- • The Plantation Negro as a Freeman, 53.
