like Henry O. Tanner, the painter, and Paul Laurence Dunbar, the
poet--show the potentialities of the race even without white admixture;
and as men of this stamp are capable of attracting cultured white
wives, the fusing process, beginning at the top with types like these,
should be far less unwelcome than that which starts with the dregs of
both races. But the negroid hair and complexion being, in Mendelian
language, "dominant," these black traits are not easy to eliminate from
the hybrid posterity; and in view of all the unpleasantness, both
immediate and contingent, that attends the blending of colours, only
heroic souls on either side should dare the adventure of intermarriage.
Blacks of this temper, however, would serve their race better by making
Liberia a success or building up an American negro State, as Mr. William
Archer recommends, or at least asserting their rights as American
citizens in that sub-tropical South which without their labour could
never have been opened up. Meantime, however scrupulously and
justifiably America avoids physical intermarriage with the negro, the
comic spirit cannot fail to note the spiritual miscegenation which,
while clothing, commercialising, and Christianising the ex-African, has
given "rag-time" and the sex-dances that go to it, first to white
America and thence to the whole white world.

The action of the crucible is thus not exclusively physical--a
consideration particularly important as regards the Jew. The Jew may be
Americanised and the American Judaised without any gamic interaction.

IV

Among the Jews _The Melting Pot_, though it has in some instances served
to interpret to each other the old generation and the new, has more
frequently been misunderstood by both. While a distinguished Christian
clergyman wrote that it was "calculated to do for the Jewish race what
'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for the coloured man," the Jewish pulpits of
America have resounded with denunciation of its supposed solution of the
Jewish problem by dissolution. As if even a play with a purpose could do
more than suggest and interpret! It is true that its leading figure,
David Quixano, advocates absorption in America, but even he is speaking
solely of the American Jews and asks his uncle why, if he objects to the
dissolving process, he did not work for a separate Jewish land. He is
not offering a panacea for the Jewish problem, universally applicable.
But he urges that the conditions of