each
pursuing his own inherited traditions, preserving his own race-purity
and race-pride; equality in things spiritual; agreed divergence in the
physical and material."[25] But, again, we want to know how this
abstract conception is to be put into actual practice in this world of
things as they are.

I have said that the Natives do not hanker after intimate social
intimacy with the whites, but this does not mean that the civilised
black man who has risen to the economic and educational level of the
European remains indifferent whenever his claim to ordinary social
recognition is denied or ignored. He would not, indeed, be human if he
did not feel hurt whenever he is slighted and treated with contempt by
people from whom he differs only in his physical appearance and colour.
In one of his essays, dealing with Native matters, Professor Jabavu, a
Native, describes how "high" feeling arose among the Native teachers and
boys in a certain training institution in South Africa at which he had
been invited to lecture because he was not allowed to see the inside of
the European principal's house, despite the fact that he had ten years
of English university life behind him.[26] Such feeling is only natural
and must tend always to create ill-will, and, knowing how strong is the
convention of the whites against social recognition of the educated
Native, we must expect increased bitterness in the future, rather than
growing good-will.

The thinking white man, who would fain be just to every one, is
perplexed by two conflicting emotions. He feels that the clean-living,
law-abiding, educated Native is a man not inferior to himself whom he
therefore ought to recognise as a fellow-citizen, but whenever he sees
this fellow-citizen aspiring or laying claim to the social recognition
that involves contact with white women he is filled instantly with wrath
which he cannot justify to himself and yet cannot suppress. It is easy
to see that where instead of common courtesy and mutual recognition from
one another of two sections of a community, constant irritation and
ill-will result, there the existence of the whole is threatened with
disaster. Under such conditions we must expect, not parallel progress,
but strife and enmity; not peace, but a sword.

The Jews may be cited to show how a separate and peculiar people may be
able to live together with other races without either clashing with or
being assimilated by these but we must remember th