The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn
strengthen it; we should studiously avoid offending it. But social equality must deadly wound it and hence drag miscegenation and all South America in its train. 

 But some may deny that the mongrelization of the Southern people would offend the race notion—would corrupt or degrade the Southern stock of humanity. If so, then such a one has yet to learn the largest-writ lessons of history and the most impressive doctrines of biological science. That the Negro is markedly inferior to the Caucasian is proved both craniologically and by six thousand years of planet-wide experimentation; and that the commingling of inferior with superior must lower the higher is just as certain as that the half-sum of two and six is only four.   [1]  

 [1]

 If accepted science teaches anything at all, it teaches that the heights of being in civilized man have been reached along one path and one only—the path of Selection, of the preservation of favoured individuals and of favoured races. The deadly enemy of the whole process of uplifting, of the Drang nach oben, of the course of history itself, is pammixia. Only give it play, and it would inevitably level all life into one undistinguished heap. Now, amalgamation of Black and White is only a special case of  pammixia. The hope of the human lies in the superhuman; and the possibility of the superhuman is given in selection, in natural and rational selection, among the children that are to be, of the parents of the men to come. The notion of social racial equality is thus seen to be abhorrent alike to instinct and to reason; for it flies in the face of the process of the suns, it runs counter to the methods of the mind of God. 

 It is idle to talk of education and civilization and the like as corrective or compensative agencies.   [2]  All are weak and beggarly as over against the almightiness of heredity, the omniprepotence of the transmitted germ-plasma. Let this be amerced of its ancient rights, let it be shorn in some measure of its exceeding weight of ancestral glory, let it be soiled in its millennial purity and integrity, and nothing shall ever restore it; neither wealth, nor culture, nor science, nor art, nor morality, nor religion—not even Christianity itself. Here and there these may redeem some happy spontaneous variation, some lucky freak of nature; but nothing more—they can never redeem the race. If this be not true, then history and biology are alike false; then Darwin and Spencer, Hæckel and Weismann, Mendel and Pearson, have lived and laboured in vain. 

 [2]


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