Zulus are fit for anything that ordinary men of our own race can do; the Arabs are more educable, but of a sombre disposition; the red are inferior. The Mulattoes are of feeble vitality, rarely surviving beyond middle age. Professor Shaler's father, an able physician, had never seen a half-breed more than sixty years old. As the reputation of the Mulatto is generally bad, perhaps unjustly, "we may welcome the fact that this mixed stock is likely to disappear" (pp. 33-38). In a later article in the same volume, Professor Shaler contributes some valuable thoughts and estimates. Thus: "The simple yet valuable lessons of the soil-tiller they have had. For the greater number of their race, particularly those of the Guinea type, this grade of employment is as high as they may be expected to attain" (p. 148). "I feel safe in saying, from the basis of personal experience with the negroes, that somewhere near one-third of them are fit to be trained for mechanical employment of a fairly high grade" (p. 149). We do not see how it is possible to call in question either the competence or the fair-mindedness of this distinguished observer. It is worthy of special attention that he attests both the hopeless inferiority of the (pure Negro) Guinea type and at the same time its decisive numerical preponderance. The real question before us, then, concerns not so much the Negro in general, of whom there are notably superior varieties, as the very lowest Negro that West Africa has yet produced. 

 Here, then, we let the anatomical argument rest for the present. A minuter treatment will be found in a more appropriate connection in a following chapter. 

 It is a favourite subterfuge of the champions of the Black man to ascribe his unamiable characteristics of mind and temper, if not of body, to the centuries of enslavement, debasement, and even persecution that he has passed on this continent. Now we have no apology whatever to offer for the "institution" of African slavery. We recoiled from it instinctively at the dawn of consciousness, and we regard it now as an unmitigated curse to the people that practise it. But we must not leave unexposed the gross error in the defence just mentioned. These centuries have indeed been centuries of enslavement, but certainly not of debasement nor any form of retrogression. For slavery is and has been, from time immemorial, practically universal in the fatherland of the Negro—slavery more cruel and degrading and inhuman than is known elsewhere on the globe. We enter into no details, unwilling to make our pages needlessly repulsive. In fact, the training of servitude in the South has worked mightily for the Negro's advancement—not unlike 

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