mcgee] THE TREND OF HUMAN PROGRESS 4*9
larger groups — though few neighboring tribes are so inimical as to prevent occasional intermarriage, perhaps through war or en- slavement ; so that there is a constant and, on the whole, fairly rapid intermingling of blood among the savages and bar- barians of every continent or larger province. Among advanced nations, especially in that enlightenment in which individual action is largely freed of conventional barriers, international and even interracial mating is still more common. So it is not too much to say that the streams of the blood of the world are converging, if not uniting — a fact that must be accepted as a condition, howsoever repellent as a theory.
It is not easy to measure the consequences of the blending of blood, since the testimony is hardly consistent ; on the whole, it would seem that intertribal and international blending is beneficial physically as well as socially, but that interracial union is often ap- parently injurious, generally of doubtful effect, only rarely of un- questionable benefit. It is a great fact, recorded in the entire litera- ture of history, that the predominant peoples of the world are of mixed blood, and that generally the degree of predominance seems to be measured by the extent of the intermixture ; nor can it be forgotten that the blending of the white and the red has produced some of the finest specimens of humanity the world has seen, including one of the world's foremost leaders, the President of our neighboring republic; or that the mixture of white and black has produced a Frederick Douglass, a Booker T. Washington, a Blanche K. Bruce, a Paul Laurence Dunbar, and other makers of progress in the most progressive nation. By far the greater part of the interracial matings have been illicit, and between the lower specimens of one or both lines of blood, so that the evil of miscegenation may well have been intensified ; and this fact en- hances the interest of dispassionate students in the results of legal matings, and especially in those of the eminent Othellos and dignified Desdemonas domiciled in our national capital and scattered throughout the country.
�� �
