RACE IN UTOPIA
repudiation of slavery in the nineteenth century was done against a vast sullen force of ignorant pride, which, reinvigorated by the new delusions, swings back again to power.
"Science" is supposed to lend its sanction to race mania, but it is only "science" as it is understood by very illiterate people that does anything of the sort—"scientists" science, in fact. What science has to tell about "The Races of Man" will be found compactly set forth by Dr. J. Deniker, in the book published under that title.[1] From that book one may learn the beginnings of race charity. Save for a few isolated pools of savage humanity, there is probably no pure race in the whole world. The great continental populations are all complex mixtures of numerous and fluctuating types. Even the Jews present every kind of skull that is supposed to be racially distinctive, a vast range of complexion—from blackness in Goa to extreme fairness in Holland—and a vast mental and physical diversity. Were the Jews to discontinue all intermarriage with "other races" henceforth for ever, it would depend upon quite unknown laws of fecundity, prepotency, and variability what their final type would be, or indeed whether any particular type would ever prevail over diversity. And without going beyond the natives of the British Isles, one can discover an enormous range of types, tall and short, straight-haired and curly, fair and dark, supremely intelligent and unteachably stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what not. The natural
- ↑ See also an excellent paper in the American Journal of Sociology for March, 1904, "The Psychology of Race Prejudice," by W. I. Thomas.
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