ho brought back into Europe the lost principles
of Aristotelian science on which the crumbling structure of European
culture was rebuilt. To believe that the people of Asia and of Africa
may be capable of attaining to Western civilisation, but that the
offspring produced by the crossing of these races with whites will not
have the necessary capacity therefor is to me impossible. So far from
being deterrent to mental growth it would seem that an infusion of
African blood in the European serves rather to increase mental capacity;
at any rate, those who know South Africa well will not deny that an
unmistakable tincture of African blood in a white family is often
associated with marked intellectual ability. Against this concession it
has indeed been alleged that, while it must be admitted that a small
admixture of black blood in a white race enriches it, a small admixture
of white blood in a black race degrades it, but this fanciful notion has
not been supported by scientific data. The truth of the matter is that
as the blacks are the underdogs, the half-breed becomes a racial and
social bastard, as indeed he is openly named in South Africa, a man
condemned before he is tried, handicapped from birth in a way that would
drag down and keep under most of those who shout loudest about their
racial superiority. It is his condition and not his nature that keeps
the coloured man underneath.

To the man who in face of the facts of history and of to-day believes
that all we have of civilisation we owe to the Teutonic or to the
Nordic type of man, and that nothing good can ever come out of coloured
Nazareths, the possibility of the whites in South Africa becoming
browned by the selective agency of tropical light or by an infusion of
African blood, no doubt, seems an evil to be prevented at any cost, but
those who, like myself, have seen coloured women working in their homes
as thriftily and self-sacrificingly as the best of our own women, and
coloured men labouring steadily against heavy odds to improve their
condition, have become convinced that the coloured people of South
Africa suffer under no inherent disabilities when compared with the
whites, and for this reason we cannot join in the general wail over a
predicted evil which we regard as exaggerated in itself and not,
moreover, likely to happen. I would not, however, be taken to advocate
the inter-breeding of white and black. Those who have witnessed the
misery and suffering wh