Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/33

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE NEGRO
29

ing upon them for additional illustrations in the matter of their histories, their mental, moral, and physical characters or anything that may shed light upon the special subject with which I am dealing. In the next following chapter, or in Chapter III. it will be my aim to present a brief review of what we already know of the slave-trade that was carried on between the United States and the west coast of Africa prior to the Civil War. This will be merely for the purpose of reviving those incidents in the mind of the reader, and thus fill out the sociologic picture I have in hand for treatment.

In the previous chapter or Chapter I., the position of the genus Homo—man and mankind,—in the animal world was briefly set forth. Man is an animal and belongs directly in the mammalian series. To this law there has never been an exception, a single departure, since the earth became a planet. It applies just as rigidly to the men and women of the present day as it did to the earliest forms of men that were evolved from the pristine simian stock thousands of years ago. It applies with just as much truth to one individual as another—to one race as another, and to the world's anthropofauna as a whole, both past and present. It is as true of Christ as it is of the blackest Ashantee that ever came into being; as true of any one of the Popes of Rome as it is of a groveling Hottentot idiot; it is as true of both the highest, and the lowest in every and all particulars of men everywhere; finally, it is as true of the population of Africa, severally and individually, as it is of the population of the United States, severally and individually. But then when we come to the mental, moral, intellectual, and the psycho-