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