The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn
question still remains: Why does the South, if she be right in this matter, find the virtue and intelligence of the world arrayed against her? We answer, the overmass of adverse authority is indeed immense, but it is weightless. The testimony of the North and of Europe is hardly more relevant than would be that of the Martians. For in neither has the race question yet presented itself as a serious practical matter; for them the Black Peril has no existence. Hence their treatment of the subject is merely academic and sentimental. They have generous ethical ideas, respectable but well-worn and overworked maxims, high humanitarian principles; and these they ride horseback. For them the Negro is a black swan, a curious and interesting specimen in natural history; and they have no hesitance in extending their sympathy, their hospitality, and their coöperation. They remember that God "hath made of one (blood) all nations of men for to dwell on the face of the earth," but forget that the author of this noble sentiment was not an ethnologist; they pity "the nation's ward" as the victim of centuries of oppression, and to the eyes of their faith the mount of his transfiguration gleams close at hand. But the practical problem never confronts them in its unrelieved difficulties and dangers. The possibility of blood contamination is not suggested to them, or at least it never comes home to them; and they yield freely to their philanthropic impulses, not thinking whither these would lead them, not seeing the end from the beginning. Southern hearts are not less benevolent than Northern, but Southern eyes are of necessity in this matter wide open, while most others are shut. 

 But once let Northern and European eyes catch a clear glimpse of the actual peril of the situation; once let the problem step forth before them in a definite concrete form and call for immediate solution; once let the sharp question pierce the national heart, "Shall I or shall I not blend my Caucasian, world-ruling, world-conquering blood with the servile strain of Africa?" and can there be any doubt of the answer? The race instinct is now slumbering in the North and Europe, and not strangely, for there is nothing to keep it awake; but it is not extinct, it exists and is ready to spring up on occasion into fierce and resistless activity. Of this fact our treatment of the Chinese has already furnished a striking illustration. We tolerated and even petted these industrious Orientals—certainly greatly the Negro's superior—so long as they were few in number and in no way embarrassing. But at the first suggestion that they might come in droves and derange our labour system or alter the type of our civilization, there burst forth all over the North 
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