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dams, referring to the race problem in an address at Richmond, Virginia, in November, 1908, said: The American system, as we know, was founded on the assumed basis of a common humanity, that is, absence of absolutely fundamental racial characteristics was accepted as an established truth. Those of all races were welcomed to our shores. They came, aliens; they and their descendants would become citizens first, natives afterward. It was a process first of assimilation and then of absorption. On this all depended. There could be no permanent divisional lines. That theory is now plainly broken down. We are confronted by the obvious fact, as undeniable as it is hard, that the African will only partially assimilate and that he cannot be absorbed. He remains an alien element in the body politic. A foreign substance, he can neither be assimilated nor thrown out. More recently an editorial in the _Outlook_, discussing the Japanese situation in California, made this statement: The hundred millions of people now inhabiting the United States must be a united people, not merely a collection of groups of different peoples, different in racial cultures and ideals, agreeing to live together in peace and amity. These hundred millions must have common ideals, common aims, a common custom, a common culture, a common language, and common characteristics, if the nation is to endure. All this is quite true and interesting, but it does not clearly recognize the fact that the chief obstacle to the assimilation of the Negro and the Oriental are not mental but physical traits. It is not because the Negro and the Japanese are so differently constituted that they do not assimilate. If they were given an opportunity, the Japanese are quite as capable as the Italians, the Armenians, or the Slavs of acquiring our culture and sharing our national ideals. The trouble is not with the Japanese mind but with the Japanese skin. The Jap is not the right color. The fact that the Japanese bears in his features a distinctive racial hallmark, that he wears, so to speak, a racial uniform, classifies him. He cannot become a mere individual, indistinguishable in the cosmopolitan mass of the population, as is true, for example, of the Irish, and, to a lesser extent, of some of the other immigrant races. The Japanese, like the Negro, is condemned to remain
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