Social instinct has never in the past, and does not to-day, except in a few and exceptional instances, spontaneously tend to cross the limits of race.
The sooner this truth is recognized as axiomatic by all who attempt to deal with problems of race, the greater will be the possibility of dealing with them in a spirit of wisdom.
To blind our eyes to this fact, and then attempt to comprehend or deal rationally with race-problems, is to act as would a schoolboy who sets himself to solve an arithmetical puzzle in which he had failed to set down the leading term. The sooner it is recognized as axiomatic that the distinctions of race are not imaginary and artificial, but real and operative; that they form a barrier so potent that the social instincts and the consciousness of moral obligation continually fail to surmount them; that the men or the nations which may safely be trusted to act with justice and humanity within the limits of their own race are yet, in the majority of cases, wholly incapable of so acting beyond those limits; that only in the case of exceptional individuals gifted with those rare powers of sympathetic insight which enable them, beneath the multitudinous and real differences, mental and physical, which divide wholly distinct races, to see clearly those far more important elements of a common humanity which underlie and unite them, is the instinctive and unconscious extension of social feeling beyond the limits of race possible; that, for all others, wholly just and humane action beyond the limits of their own race, can be only attained as the result of a stern, conscious, unending, mental discipline; and that perhaps no individual man or woman is at the present day so highly developed as regards social instinct as to be certain that they can at all times depend on themselves to act with perfect equity where inter-racial relations are concerned; that no individual is so highly developed morally as to be able wholly to dispense with a most careful intellectual self-examination when dealings with persons of alien race and colour are entered on; and, finally, that the great moral and intellectual expansion which humanity has during the ensuing centuries to undergo, if harmonized human life on the globe is ever to be, is in the direction of extending the social instincts beyond those limits of the family, the nation, and the race, to the humanity beyond those limits:--the sooner we recognize as axiomatic these truths, the quicker will be our progress towards the comprehension and satisfactory solution of racial problems; and, failing to recognize these truths, it is perhaps wholly useless for anyone to attempt to deal with the moral and social aspects of inter-racial questions.