146 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
sense carry them safely through dangers which have proved fatal to other races. They are therefore destined to be a permanent element in the composite population of the future, and when we consider the extent and fertility of the regions which they hold, the necessity of their ever-increasing co-operation in the economic life of the world becomes apparent.
The negro race may be studied in four different sets of con- ditions: in their original state in the forests of central Africa; as a mixed race under the control of the Arab and Hamite races of the northern Sudan ; living side by side with a white population in respect to which they occupy a socially inferior position, as in South Africa and North America; and in a few isolated com- munities which enjoy rights of self-government based upon European models, as in Hayti and in the French Antilles. A cor- rect understanding of any part of the negro question demands a review of the situation of the negro under all these varying con- ditions, because only through a comparison of the aboriginal characteristics of the negro with the qualities acquired through contact with other races and civilizations can we form a just estimate of his relative capacity for progress.
We need not here enter into the controversy between polygenists and unigenists, since it has a purely ethnological interest, whereas we intend to approach the question from the point of view of the political activities of the present. No matter what may be the origin of the diversity which the human races at present exhibit whether the result of the amalgamation of an almost infinite number of disparate groups, or the consequence of continued diversification of an original type the negro race today exhibits such characteristic features and such distinct traits as to induce many observers to consider it as entirely incommen- surate with the white race; yet; on the other hand, it is physio- logically connected with the Aryans through a long series of mixed races. As we pass from Morocco or from Cairo toward the center of the Sudan, the color of the population gradually grows darker, and their features, from the regular and often beautiful type of the Hamite, merge off into the coarser characteristics of the negro race. From the pure white skin of the Berber to the
