enalized for having children. In this chapter, emphasis
has been laid on the need for a change in public opinion; in future
chapters some economic and social reforms will be suggested, which it is
believed would tend to make superior parents feel willing to have more
children.

The education of public opinion which, acting through the many agencies
named, will gradually bring about an increase in the birth-rate of
superior people, will not be speedy; but it has begun. The writers,
therefore, feel justified in thinking, not solely as a matter of
optimistic affirmation, but because of the evidence available, that the
race suicide now taking place in the old American stock will soon reach
its lowest limit, and that thereafter the birth-rate in that particular
stock will slowly rise. If it does, and if, as seems probable, the
birth-rate in some inferior sections of the American population at the
same time falls from its present level, a change in the racial
composition of the nation will take place, which, judged by past
history, is bound to be of great eugenic value.

CHAPTER XIV

THE COLOR LINE

"A young white woman, a graduate of a great university of the far North,
where Negroes are seldom seen, resented it most indignantly when she was
threatened with social ostracism in a city farther South with a large
Negro population because she insisted upon receiving upon terms of
social equality a Negro man who had been her classmate.[128]"

The incident seems trivial. But the phenomenon back of it, the "color
line," is so far-reaching that it deserves careful examination.

As the incident suggests, the color line is not a universal phenomenon.
The Germans appear to have little aversion to receiving Negroes--_in
Germany_--on terms of equality. These same Germans, when brought face to
face with the question in their colonies, or in the southern United
States, quickly change their attitude. Similarly a Negro in Great
Britain labors under much less disadvantage than he does among the
British inhabitants of Australia or South Africa.

The color line therefore exists only as the result of race experience.
This fact alone is sufficient to suggest that one should not dismiss it
lightly as the outgrowth of bigotry. Is is not perhaps a social
adaptation with survival value?

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze society's "unconscious
reasoning" which has led to the establishment of a color line--to the
denial of so