But though all peoples are teachable there are racial idiosyncrasies which we are only beginning to discover. Why, for instance, should the Hausa and the Sudanese have a natural aptitude for European military discipline while the Waganda find it irksome? Why do the Masai, whose social development is Palæolithic in its simplicity, make trustworthy policemen and prison warders, while the Somalis have been found utterly worthless in both capacities? Why are the Maoris and Solomon Islanders natural artists in wood-carving while the tribes most nearly allied to them are almost destitute of artistic skill? These natural aptitudes suggest what these races may become when we have struck off their fetters of custom and have forced them to compete with us.
Cheap and rapid means of transit are sweeping away the distinctions of dress, of custom, and, to some extent, of language, which underlie the feeling of nationality, and the races now uncivilized will soon settle for themselves the vital question whether they are to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water for the white man, or whether they are to take their place in free competition with him. The "Yellow Peril," which implies national cohesion among the Mongolians, may be a chimera, but it is impossible to believe that a white skin is to be for ever a sort of patent of nobility in the world state of the future.
History teaches us that there can be no middle course. Either race antipathy and race contempt must disappear, or one breed of men must dominate the others. The psychology of race contempt has never been dispassionately studied. It is felt most strongly in the United States and the West Indies; a little less strongly in the other British tropical colonies. In England it is sporadic, and is generally confined to the educated classes. It is scarcely to be noticed in France, Spain, Portugal or Italy. From this it might be argued that it is peculiar to races of Teutonic descent were it not for the fact that Germans in tropical countries do not seem to feel it. It is, moreover, a sentiment of modern growth. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Englishmen did not regard coloured people as their inferiors by reason of the colour of their skin. It appears, in fact, to date only from the time of slavery in the West Indian colonies, and yet the Romans, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese, who were the greatest slave-owners in history, never held marriage with coloured people in contempt. The only race hatred in the Middle Ages was anti-Semitic, and this was due to the Crusader spirit. The colour line, as it is called, is drawn more firmly by men than by women, and deep-seated as it is in the Southern States just now it may be nothing more than a passing phase of sentiment, a subconscious instinct of self-preservation in a race which feels that its old predominance is threatened by equality with its former servants. If you analyze the sentiment it comes to this. You may tolerate the coloured man in every relation but one: you may converse with him, eat with him, live with him on terms of equality, but your gorge rises at the idea of admitting him to become a member of your family by marriage. In the ordinary social relations you do not take him quite seriously; if he is a commoner you treat him as your potential servant; if a dusky potentate you yield him a sort of jesting deference; but in that one matter of blood alliance with him you will always keep him at arm's length. That is the view even of the Englishman who has not lived in a black man's country, and upon that is built the extraordinary race hatred of the Southern States, where a white man will not consent to sit in a tramcar with a negro, though the white man be a cotton operative and the negro a University professor.