al jealousy which is probably bound up with
the primary instinct of self-preservation. Those people who profess
belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race naturally look
upon the tendency towards race-blending as a perverse proclivity, while
those who think that all men are potentially equal regard it as a
wholesome instinct provided by nature to counteract the feebleness and
infertility which cause the dying-out of the race that becomes too
pure.

Racial antipathy seems to depend in the degree of its strength upon the
degree of physical disparity between given races. In the so-called Latin
races of to-day, prejudice against black people is certainly weaker than
in the blond races of Northern Europe. Is this aversion a matter of
absolute instinct or is it an acquired social characteristic and as such
liable to change? I think the answer must be that this racial repugnance
is not naturally inherent in children, nor in women towards the men of a
different kind, nor in men towards the women of another race, but that
it arises naturally and spontaneously and, in this sense, instinctively,
through the feeling of jealousy which is caused, in both men and women,
by fear of losing their natural mates to rivals of both sexes from
another and disparate race.

White children who grow up together with Native children certainly have
no instinctive feeling against their black playfellows; they have to be
taught to look down upon and keep away from the companions of their
childhood, a fact which no candid observer will deny. It is also a
truism of history that the fair-skinned women of a conquered country,
as a rule, will yield themselves easily to the swarthy barbarians who
have killed or overcome their husbands and brothers. The many women who
in British seaports, and in the German towns that were recently occupied
by French coloured troops, have lived and cohabited with African men
have proved by so doing that they have had no instinctive racial sense
of hostility against black men. It has been stated by independent and
competent witnesses, who are corroborated by German newspapers of good
standing, that the black troops have a very marked attraction for a
large number of German women, and that the German men hate the black men
because the German women do not.[22] The fact that white women in South
Africa and in the Southern States of America never associate with black
men does not, I think, prove that they are contro