Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/123

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THE NEGRO
107

men of fine position, family and standing, as I know personally to be the case. Such matings are usually made where scandal is the least likely to flourish. Children may or may not follow, and I imagine very rarely between black men and white women, — where more certain means are adopted to prevent such calamities. All this is very degrading, injurious, and harmful to both races, though in very different ways. In the case of the whites it aids in this community, the adulteration of the higher stock by a baser material, and such practice is harmful under any and all conditions ; whereas in the case of the negroes, the majority of whom believe that procreation and nature's method of insuring it, is about all that life means, it fosters in their minds the erroneous idea that they are ethnologically the whites' equals, and consequently become dissatisfied with the social plane they are obliged to occupy, and are restive under what they deem to be intentional barriers the whites place in their road to wealth and political power. It is impossible for them to appreciate the fact that nature is the author of such restrictions and limitations and not their Anglo-Saxon superiors. Brains, ability, and the power of achievement are the factors that are principally responsible for the status of the individual as well as the nation, and not that either simply possess human form and the power of speech, — a notion that appears to dominate the mind of the African in this country.

As we pass southward to the mid-Atlantic States and the cities in them where the negroes are far more numerous in proportion to the number of whites in the population, as in Baltimore and Washington and such places, not only is the crossing between the two