The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn
 [14]

 From the convergence of all such testimony, which may be multiplied indefinitely, there seems no escape whatever. We must concede, with Lombroso: "It is impossible to contemplate these facts without admitting that marriages between some human races are much less fertile and happy than between others;" and especially unfortunate are those between such extremes as Whites and Negroes. When such anthropologists as Waitz, Serres, Deschamps, Bodichon, anticipate a millennium from universal miscegenation, it is only sentimentalism or else forgetfulness of the distinction drawn so properly by Topinard (Eléments d'Anthropologie générale, 1885) between the intermingling of nearly related and of distantly related races. In the first case the result is, in general, certainly good; in the latter, it is quite as certainly bad. 

 But let us now, merely for the moment and for the sake of argument, admit that both our premises are in doubt; that, perhaps, after all the Negro is not inferior organically—mentally, morally, or physically—to the Caucasian, and that interfertility might, perhaps, work no deterioration; would the case be essentially altered? Assuredly not. For even then the most extreme negrophilist must still admit that there is, at least, a reasonable doubt; even if the Negro be not proved inferior, yet he is certainly not proved equal, and there is a large body of at least apparent evidence against him; even if it be not certain that miscegenation would work deterioration, it is at least very possible and seemingly probable. Who, then, would have the foolhardihood to make this experiment of race amalgamation—an experiment which, once made, is made forever; whose consequences could never be undone—when there is at least and at the very lowest an undeniable possibility, not to say certainty, that those consequences would be disastrous in the extreme? Can we imagine a more wanton folly? Would such an experiment beseem any other place so well as the madhouse? 

 But some one will say that we are fighting "bogies"; that no one in the North, much less in the South, desires any such amalgamation. Do not believe it! The intense, the supreme yearning of large bodies of Negroes is for social recognition among the Whites—more especially for intermarriage with their haughty, old-time despisers. Who does not know this, simply does not understand the dominant facts of Southern life.   [15]  True, there may be no longer anyone in the North that openly advocates miscegenation—no one that would welcome or even tolerate it in his family, though we remember to have read years ago a distinct declaration, by no mean authority, that it might be a positive advantage 
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