was no misfortune in this mingling of incongruities, no problem in the adjustment of their relations?

8

Do not object that in Washington there has 9been no sudden metamorphosis, but that the condition of things has gradually come to pass through the slow operation of historic forces. That makes no real difference, save that the Washingtonian has no “first shock of surprise” to get over. The essence of the matter is that half of the elbow-room of life is taken up by an alien race. Even disregarding, as (perhaps) temporary and corrigible, the condition of hostility between the races, we cannot but see in the bare fact of their juxtaposition in almost equal numbers, and, theoretically, on a standing of equal citizenship, an anomalous condition of affairs, as to the probable outcome of which history affords us no guidance.

9

Walk the streets of Washington for a single day, and you will realize that the colour-problem is not, as some English and Northern American writers assume, a chimera sprung from nothing but the inhuman prejudice of the Southern white. It is not a simple matter which a little patience and good-temper will presently arrange. It is a real, a terrible difficulty, not to be overcome by happy-go-lucky humanitarianism.

It may be a great pity that Nature implanted race-instincts deep in our breasts—Nature has done so many thoughtless things in her day. But there they are, not to be ignored or sentimentalized away. They are part of the stuff of human character, out of which the future must be shaped. The wise statesman will no more 10disregard them than the wise carpenter will disregard the grain of a piece of timber—or the knots in it.

10

One principle I arrived at very early in this investigation—namely, that black is not always white, nor white invariably black.

1. “Intermarriage between the races is forbidden by law in all the Southern States, and also in the following Northern and Western States: Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Oregon, and Utah. In all other Northern and Western States marriage between the races is lawful.”—Ray Stannard Baker: “Following the Colour-Line.”

2. There is no doubt, I think, that the white man—and here I mean not the Southerner, nor the American, but the white man as such—resents in extremes of the negro type just that air of 

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