or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination
of the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him
much more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people
during the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and
it was upon the race question that his attention concentrated.

The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an entirely
different environment was another discord of race and culture, and
he found in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected his
impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was devoted to a
comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into human dissensions
in lower Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture conflicts,
and he could work particularly upon the differences between men of the
same race who were Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively.
He could compare the Bengali Mahometan not only with the Bengali
Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan from the north-west. "If one
could scrape off all the creed and training, would one find much the
same thing at the bottom, or something fundamentally so different that
no close homogeneous social life and not even perhaps a life of just
compromise is possible between the different races of mankind?"

His answer to that was a confident one. "There are no such natural and
unalterable differences in character and quality between any two sorts
of men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-operation in
the world impossible," he wrote.

But he was not satisfied with his observations in India. He found the
prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating. He went on
after his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of
several visits to China, and thence he crossed to America. White found a
number of American press-cuttings of a vehemently anti-Japanese quality
still awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to him that
Benham had given a considerable amount of attention to the development
of the "white" and "yellow" race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his
chief interest at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington
and thence south; he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then