Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/104

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THE NEGRO

laws as immutable in their operation as the most fixed laws in all nature. The matter of chance never enters the result in the case of any individual, be he black or white. In the main trend again men breed true to their race, their stock, and the lines of their family ascent. In investigating the attainments, accomplishments and achievements of any line of pure-blooded and unmixed negro stock, we shall no more chance to find members in it who are, or have been, distinguished biologists, physicians, or artists, than we do, when we come to make similar researches in any first-class Anglo-Saxon pedigree, meet with semi-transformed cannibalistic savages, superstitious religionists, and natural criminals as we do in the case of the negroes.

Any number of people can be found in this country today who will stoutly deny, and they believe what they say, too, that there is any interbreeding going on at all between the blacks and the whites, and that the numerous mulattoes we see are due to the effects of climate. Such people are, of course, absolutely blind as to what is going on directly about them ; they are ignorant, and they do not care to see. Take the city of Washington, for instance, I can remember distinctly thirty-five years ago, when a mulatto in the streets of that place was, comparatively speaking, the rare exception ; while they are to be seen there now simply in scores upon scores. Some of them are so white, that it takes a very keen eye to detect the Ethiopian blood in them. Some are wonderfully handsome creatures, with superb figures, but handsome and fine-physiqued only in the sense that our American skunk is likewise a beautiful creature. It is also a black animal with more or less of a white stripe in it, that is given to stealing