Part 6

But although we believe that progress has been started always and everywhere by the efforts of reformers that have occurred as spontaneous variations from the dead level of their fellows independent of time and circumstances, we need not deny the effect of environment, especially the effect of an inimical environment, upon a new movement after it has been started, and it may well be that the physical disadvantages of the great "dark" continent may have made difficult, if not impossible, in the past that meeting and friction of different cultures which seem to be essential to the birth of intellectual life, so that here the admitted isolation of the inhabitants during many centuries may have served to squelch initiative and foster stagnation. Nevertheless the influence of environment must not be over-rated for we see that general contentment with resulting inertia have existed for untold ages in places where now the sounds and shocks of daily progress reverberate in a thousand fields of civilised activity without any change being discernible either in the bodily or mental calibre of the people themselves, and this must surely teach us that it is not incapacity nor yet unfavourable physical environment, but that, more than anything else, it is the dead weight of human conservatism that holds down a nation or a race to its particular level; that it is the human element in the general milieu that determines human development, a lesson that has been well summed up in the Chinese aphorism "A man is more like the age he lives in than he is like his father and mother."

Some years ago a theory was advanced which assumed the presence from the beginning of an inherently superior race of blond Europeans who, it was supposed, left their lairs in the North from time to time to harass and conquer essentially inferior people in the South whom they innervated through intermarriage with their superior mentality, and thereby succeeded in rearing those mighty civilisations that waned and fell when the "blue" blood of the invaders became absorbed and lost in the old autochthonous streams. Apart from the lack of cogent evidence this theory, if it may be so called, is unsatisfactory in that it does not explain why these putative super-men failed to establish within their own stimulating environment any of those great cultures that were set up in places and under climatic conditions which are supposed to have been far less provocative to progress. To-day the theories of Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain who both held up the Teutons as being at all times the greatest and noblest of human kind, do not impress the non-Teuton part of the world, nor do the later apostles of the more recent "Nordic" race faith, like Madison Grant, and others of his school, succeed in persuading thinking men and women that the Scandinavians and the English are the only people that ever could initiate and sustain great civilisations. The fact that great civilisations have been built up and are now being developed by people who were and are neither blond nor Nordic makes it impossible to believe these pretensions to exclusive racial genius and merit. "All the talk," says Professor Flinders Petrie, "about Nordic supremacy is vanity when we look at the facts in Europe. Dark Iberians and Picts, Asiatics, Gaels and Celts, are the basis of our peoples. Further, it is in the time of stress and difficulty that the older stocks come again to the top. The majority of the men of power among the Allies have not been fair Nordics but dark men of the underlying races."

Recent study has indeed dissipated that fascinating idyl about the old race of tall, blond Aryans as the originators of our present civilisation, for it has been shown that the so-called Aryan civilisation was inferior in many ways to the primitive culture of neolithic times, and it can now hardly be doubted that our classical civilisation is of Mediterranean origin though Aryanised in speech. It is now generally accepted that history points not to Scandinavia and Germany, but to the lands lying round the Mediterranean Sea as furnishing the matrix out of which civilisation has sprung. It is to the South rather than to the North, to the early people of Egypt, Palestine, Greece and Rome, and not to the primitive inhabitants of Scandinavia and Germany, that we must look for those great men whose intellect and character were strong enough to overcome the natural conservatism of their times. The mind of the early white men of the North never soared higher than a valhalla peopled with puerile deities and blood-stained warriors whereas the swarthy thinkers of the South discovered the unseen God, invented art and philosophy and developed law and government. And though the Church proclaims the highest of all born leaders, Christ himself, to be the very son of God, yet was he a native of Palestine and not a fair-haired, blue-eyed Teuton as represented by mediæval painters of Germany and Holland.

It is no doubt true that the invaders and the immigrants have often achieved more in their new surroundings than in their homelands, as the Moors in Spain and the Irish in America, but it must not be forgotten that the civilisation which the new-comers have enriched by virtue of their new found freedom from home conservatism has not been of their making; they may have added thereto but they did not beget it; the spade-work, which is the hardest part, had been done before they arrived.

Looking, round the world to-day we see clearly that race is not the determining factor in contemporary progress. In Japan we see a people, admittedly not white, who until yesterday were stagnating under a system of childish feudalism, now developing at a great pace a culture similar with and not inferior to that of modern Europe, while in Western Ireland we see white people living in a state of sloth and squalor below that of many "raw" Bantu tribes in South Africa. These facts show that any race, white black, or yellow, may be kept down simply by the forces of conservatism, chief among which is priestcraft operating through prejudice and superstition in the name of religion. To say this is not to cavil at the priests of any particular time or creed. We must have priests as well as prophets. The prophet of a new faith begins his mission by breaking the images of the priests before him and is succeeded by his own priests who set up new images and dogmas wherewith to conserve the new-found creed until it in turn becomes too old when, in the never-ceasing course of evolution, the law of variation bids a new prophet arise. The priest must needs be to preserve the world from the anarchy of too many reformers, but his power, if long continued, tends to inhibit the divine spirit of discontent which makes for human advancement. It is the priest's duty to preserve the old and to hinder the new, and when he finds he can no longer ignore the new inventions that are made around him he will at most accept the new learning as a means only to preserve the old order whose servant he is. The founder of the Society of Jesus enjoined his followers: "Let us all think in the same way, let us all speak in the same manner, if possible," and it is reported of him that he said that were he to live five hundred years he would always repeat "no novelties in theology, in philosophy or logic, not even in grammar." In Africa priestcraft, in its primitive form of witchcraft, has continued for unnumbered ages to perpetuate the elementary creed of ancestor worship whose chief article is that the ways of the fathers must remain the ways of the children, and that to depart from the old and established order is sinful and wicked, and under this baneful authority progress has been impossible.

But although the heavy conservatism enforced by this primitive cult has smothered initiative during many centuries it does not follow that the mind and character of the African people have been impaired thereby beyond the life of each generation. The mental sloth in which the Western world lay steeped during the dark ages before the Reformation did not become a heritable defect. But apart from the question of the possibility of the transmission of acquired characters we have the fact that within the scope of his daily life the conservative and uncivilised African has to face and solve as many difficult problems as the civilised European in his different surroundings. That these problems are made up of elements differing from those that constitute the problems of the civilised man in his daily avocation proves only a difference of content, not of difficulty. The mental strain involved in leading the so-called simple life of the so-called savage is, on the whole, no less intense than that suffered by the civilised man in maintaining his civilised existence. In the all-surrounding air of superstition and mutual suspicion in which the African moves and has his being he requires cunning to circumvent the cunning of his fellows,--and very deep cunning it sometimes is,--so deep, indeed, that the intellectual European has difficulty in following the dark and devious ways thereof. Vigilance and resourcefulness, careful observation, prudence, forethought, caution, judicious apprizement of character and intelligent calculation of probabilities are required for the planning of the primitive African's daily campaign against the forces of darkness with which he is surrounded, and to carry out these plans he must have courage, firmness of will and self-control in no less measure than the average European city-dweller. To avoid the ever-present chance of being found guilty of witchcraft, which in the past meant always death, the African has had to develop the faculty of lying to a high point of efficiency, and no one who knows him will contend that he is inferior to the European in this respect. The natural education of the Natives include the art of lying as the education of Spartan boys included the practice of larceny. Lying, we know, develops the memory, for a good memory is essential to successful lying. Some of the ruses and stratagems thought out by Natives fleeing from the king's wrath or the witch doctor's doom, of which I have heard from the Natives themselves, have seemed to me to be in subtilty of design and in daring of execution as admirable as any that may be found in contemporary detective fiction, while the fortitude with which defeat and death has been accepted by some of the unfortunate fugitives would evoke admiration in the least impressionable of men. I say therefore that those who deny to the Africans the capacity for sustained collective and purposive effort of mind and body because these qualities have so far not been shown by them in the building up of a civilisation of their own must consider the fact that the nations which to-day lead the world in all the ways of civilisation remained for thousands of years without leaders and without achievement while the people who now lag behind produced those mighty men that led and paved the way to the great civilisations of the past, and I think that we must recognise in that fact a lesson to teach us that present inferiority is no proof of permanent inability, wherefore it may well be that the Natives of Africa will some day rise and compete with their present overlords in the mastery of all the arts and crafts of a modern state.

"But," says the white South African, voicing the general opinion, "this is all very well; the Native may have the brains, but he does not, even now when he has the chance of proving himself, show the same capacity for strenuous and continued effort that the white man has shown. He cannot stand alone; if left to himself he will sink back rapidly into savagery."

That the South African Natives are still in a stage where they cannot stand alone, so that if left entirely to their own devices they would lapse back into barbarism, is not, I agree, open to doubt. But would not the same fate overtake any nation or community, regardless of race, if it were completely cut off from all outside help and influence. The civilised Romans who conquered Britain in the early Christian era, no doubt, looked upon the primitive Britons as a feeble folk when compared with themselves, but the erstwhile slaves have since demonstrated their capacity for developing a civilisation utterly beyond the imagination of their foreign masters. Rome was not built in a day. The rearing of Western civilisation required many centuries, and it can hardly be doubted that if the early builders of the great cultures had been left in isolation instead of being stimulated continually from without through foreign learning and influence neither Ancient Rome nor Modern Europe would have come into being. Isolation has always and everywhere been followed by stagnation and regression and there is no reason for expecting the Natives of South Africa to furnish an exception to the universal rule.

That the average Native is lazy no one who knows him will deny. He is certainly no less lazy than the average European work-man who must be compelled by economic pressure to do hard labour. The rough and menial work of the world has always been done through some sort of compulsion, either slavery or some kind of economic coaction, for it is not in human nature, white or black, to work hard at uncongenial tasks unless superior force in some shape or other supplies the driving power. The manual workers of Europe are forced by the economic conditions under which they live to do the heavy and rough work that has to be done--there are very few, even among white men, who like rough work for its own sake--and when we consider how small are the wants of the average South African Native we are often surprised that he works as hard as he does. The common expression "As lazy as a kaffir" is counterbalanced by the equally common saying used about a white man who works hard at anything "He works like a nigger," which suggests that there is not much difference between the two races in this respect.

Nevertheless the mental attitude of the average Native undoubtedly enables him to enjoy laziness more than the average European whose early habits have been formed by different influences. Primitive man is a lazy man whatever race he may belong to, and civilisation, which has often been helped on by direct slavery, is indeed itself a system of slavery, under which the toilers are driven to their tasks by the goad of necessity. The fact that many Native youths frequently leave their studies before completing the prescribed course, with the entry "Left school tired" against their names, is often cited as showing that the capacity of the Native for sustained mental effort is not as great as that of the average European, but here, again, it must be remembered that the general conditions and home influences under which the bulk of European boys grow up tend to keep them at their studies whereas the Native school boy is not fortified by similar support. The dread of becoming an "unemployable" through lack of education, which is a forcible spur to effort in both parents and children among the whites, is not felt by the Natives who can always find work to do at wages that will satisfy their ordinary wants, and, moreover, the Native's chance of gaining profit and preferment through being well educated are still few in South Africa, so that where there is neither penalty for failure nor reward for success we cannot expect more effort than we find. When education becomes as general in South Africa as it is among the people of Europe then it will be possible to institute fair comparisons. Education is the discoverer of ability and without the opportunity it gives genius will languish and die unknown, as said that acute observer of human nature, Machiavelli, in speaking about the leaders of antiquity, "Without opportunity their powers of mind would have been extinguished and without those powers the opportunity would have come in vain."

Assuming that the capacity for acquiring Western education and civilisation is no greater in the American Negroes than in the Bantu we may note the opinion of a recent student of the race question in America, as being in point here. In his book "Children of the Slaves," Mr. Stephen Graham says "The fact is, Negrodom has to a great extent qualified to vote. Half the population is sunk in economic bondage and illiteracy, but the other half has more than average capacity for citizenship."

The opinion so often expressed in South Africa that "Education is a kind of thing that doesn't agree with the Nigger" is born of the same feeling that animated the power-holding minorities against the illiterate majorities in Europe not many years ago, and, in justice to the minorities, it must be conceded that the effect of education upon the masses has always been disturbing and often disastrous.

Speaking now from my own experience I can say that I have found no ill-effects from education in Natives; on the contrary, I have found, as a rule, that the Native who has had an ordinary school education is generally more amenable to precept and admonition than the raw kaffir though less bovinely submissive and therefore more resentful of indignities offered to him. The fact that the educated kaffir comes more often in the way of committing theft and dishonesty than his illiterate brother is in itself sufficient to account for the not unduly large number of theftuous crimes with which he is credited as a class; but on the other hand, the propensity in the primitive male that leads to sexual assaults upon women is undoubtedly checked and lessened by education and school-discipline. Education will bring out and give scope to all that is good and all that is bad in the Native as it has done with the white man. If the Natives have not sunk to those depths of infamy which are disclosed daily in the criminal courts of Europe and America it is not because of want of the usual percentage of criminally disposed people among them but because of want of education and opportunity. Commercial immorality and developed swindling are impossible without a commerce, but the cupidity that begets these forms of vice is not lacking amongst the Natives and waits only for the opportunities which developed commerce affords. The potential capacity for criminality and immorality is indeed no less among the Natives than among Europeans. Theft, arson, murder and rape are the most common forms of crime committed by the Natives to-day because the opportunities for perpetrating systematic fraud are as yet few among them. Unnatural immorality is common enough in the kraals and in the "compounds," for the Natives have their "perverts" as well as the whites. At the Native "beer-drinks" crapulous lewdness is as common as it is in the bucolic orgies of European peasantry. There is no "Native" innocence nor is there any "Native" vice, the virtue and the vice, the capacity and the character of the Native are the human qualities and failings that are common to mankind.

The Native is no more able to withstand the enervating effects of isolation than the European, he is no more anxious to work hard for small wages, no more and no less capable of honesty and thrift, no more and no less endowed with human virtue, no more and no less cursed with the vices of the world, no more human and no less divine than is his master, the white man.

When Machiavelli asserts in general of men that "they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowards, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life and children--when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you." He thought, no doubt, of white men only, but to me his appreciation of the baser side of human nature seems no less applicable to the black people of South Africa, and when, on the other hand, Shakespeare declaims:

"What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty!"

he also, we may be sure, thought of his own kind, but to me, again, the beautiful words, which usage cannot cheapen, express the wonder I have often felt at the wealth of imagery, the mental grasp, the wisdom and the natural dignity in very many untutored natives I have met with, and it is this experience which makes me believe that the present difference between the Europeans and the Native race is one of degree and not of kind, and that, in the fullness of time, achievement will follow the latent genius with which, as I hold, nature has endowed, in equal degree with ourselves, the great Bantu branch of the human family.

Yet I am no encomiast of the Natives, for I know them to be no better than other people, but search as I may, I cannot find that Native character which is alleged to be inherently different from the white man's character. Did not Mark Twain find, as the most conspicuous result of his travels, that "there is a good deal of human nature everywhere," and is it not true that human nature is everywhere the same?

We are far too apt to exaggerate both in our disparagement and in our praise of backward people. Many people still think, if they think at all, of the South African Native as a being of the kind imagined by Hobbes when he wrote: "Man in his natural state is towards man as a wolf," and, on the other hand, there are still many who regard him, after the fancy of Rousseau, as a sort of primitive man-child existing in a state of natural innocence from which he is being driven by the corrupting influence of the civilised invaders. But all this is wrong. The Native is not a savage. Even before the whites came to South Africa the Bantu lived in social order under a political system in which the principles of constitutionalism were clearly recognised. To-day the Bantu are simply a race of barbarians in various stages of transition from a crude civilisation to a highly developed civilisation, and we shall do well to remember that the process of transition which we are now witnessing is one in which individual mistakes and failures will be more conspicuous, though no more significant, than the general advance.

MISCEGENATION.

If it is true that the human nature of the Bantu is no whit different from the human nature of the Europeans then it is a fair question to ask why the two races should not be able to live together in liberty, equality and fraternity as people of one nation or body politic. It is because human nature is governed by laws which, unlike the laws of mathematics, cannot be laid down with certainty that we find ourselves unable to give a positive answer to this question. The human nature of the whites, like the human nature of all races that have been predominant before, is swayed by the feelings of pride and prejudice that arise through differences of complexion, physical appearance and bodily odour, as well as the difference in racial achievement, and these essentially human feelings, if they remain as strong as they now are in South Africa, will render impossible the fraternity that implies the liberty to intermarry, so that there arises for our consideration a second question, namely, whether without full fraternity and social equality the two races may yet live together in the land in political liberty and equality.

We observe from the earliest times a rhythmic play, as it were, of opposite forces that tends, alternately, to build up and to break down and mingle human races, but of the laws that underlie and govern these forces we know little or nothing. On the one hand we see how man has always and everywhere shown what the advocates of so-called racial purity have called "a perverse predisposition to mismate" which has made it exceedingly difficult to classify existing human varieties. On the other hand we see throughout nature how a pronounced disparity between varieties of the same species engenders an aversion from one another of the different varieties which seems to arise, in men and animals alike, through the instinct of sexual jealousy which is probably bound up with the primary instinct of self-preservation. Those people who profess belief in the inherent superiority of a particular race naturally look upon the tendency towards race-blending as a perverse proclivity, while those who think that all men are potentially equal regard it as a wholesome instinct provided by nature to counteract the feebleness and infertility which cause the dying-out of the race that becomes too pure.

Racial antipathy seems to depend in the degree of its strength upon the degree of physical disparity between given races. In the so-called Latin races of to-day, prejudice against black people is certainly weaker than in the blond races of Northern Europe. Is this aversion a matter of absolute instinct or is it an acquired social characteristic and as such liable to change? I think the answer must be that this racial repugnance is not naturally inherent in children, nor in women towards the men of a different kind, nor in men towards the women of another race, but that it arises naturally and spontaneously and, in this sense, instinctively, through the feeling of jealousy which is caused, in both men and women, by fear of losing their natural mates to rivals of both sexes from another and disparate race.

White children who grow up together with Native children certainly have no instinctive feeling against their black playfellows; they have to be taught to look down upon and keep away from the companions of their childhood, a fact which no candid observer will deny. It is also a truism of history that the fair-skinned women of a conquered country, as a rule, will yield themselves easily to the swarthy barbarians who have killed or overcome their husbands and brothers. The many women who in British seaports, and in the German towns that were recently occupied by French coloured troops, have lived and cohabited with African men have proved by so doing that they have had no instinctive racial sense of hostility against black men. It has been stated by independent and competent witnesses, who are corroborated by German newspapers of good standing, that the black troops have a very marked attraction for a large number of German women, and that the German men hate the black men because the German women do not. The fact that white women in South Africa and in the Southern States of America never associate with black men does not, I think, prove that they are controlled by instinctive racial or sexual aversion but rather that women, as a whole, are, by reason of their physical inability to dispute with men the ultimate ratio of all order that lies in brute force, thoroughly amenable to the rule of social conventions imposed upon them by their jealous masters. I say this because we see that the aversion that has been inculcated from without tends to disappear wherever the man-established conventions lapse or cease to govern either through the comparatively small numbers of black men being insufficient in certain localities to cause fear in the white men living there, as in some seaport towns, or through the temporary break-down of the customary standards of society brought about by war and revolution, as in those parts of Germany that were recently garrisoned by coloured soldiers.

Nature having cast upon the male the duty of winning and holding the females of his species it is easy to see why the racial feelings of jealousy and ill-will are more positive and more active in the man than in the woman, and this explains, as far as these things can be explained, why white men will allow themselves to cohabit freely with black women to whom they feel naturally attracted but will "see red" and commit murder as soon as they find a black man attempting to gain the favour of a woman of their own colour. "Un adolescent aime toutes les femmes" say the French, and it is generally accepted that man is by nature more inclined to polygamy than woman is towards polyandry, still man and woman are both swayed and motived by the same elemental jealousy that is born of fear of losing something valued; the emotion which Descartes has so well defined as "une espèce de crainte qui se rapport au désir qu'on a de se conserver la possession de quelque bien."

It is, no doubt, true that the thinking white woman, no less than the thinking white man, is led to feel dismay and even resentment against the Natives by apprehension of the possibility of danger to white civilisation through fusion of white and black, but this is a feeling caused by intelligent appreciation rather than by instinctive apprehension, and as such liable to be dispelled by argument tending to show that no real danger threatens. During a recent agitation against miscegenation in Rhodesia a number of letters written by white women appeared in the press from which it was easy to gather that the chief concern of the writers was not the possible degradation of the whites, though this was not overlooked, but rather the simple fact that some white men were cohabiting with black women to the prejudice of the matrimonial chances of eligible women of their own race.

But it is unwise to dogmatise in the realms of social and racial psychology; we have not yet discovered the means for analysing with precision the subtle elements of the human soul. I have used the word instinct here in the sense given to it by William James, who defines it as "the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends without foresight of the ends, and without previous education in the performance," but when we reflect upon the transitoriness of human instincts, as compared with those of animals, and recognise that the human instincts are, as James also says, implanted in us for the sake of giving rise to habits, and then to fade away, we see how difficult it is to draw a line between the instinctive and the acquired or habitual mood or feeling.

If we believe that racial antipathy is caused by the feeling of jealousy that arises instinctively, so to speak, from man's inner nature, then it is safe to say that it will last as long as the substance from which it springs, and as long as the racial difference which provokes it remains, but this belief is not firmly established in the general mind. The whites, as a whole, feel far from sure about the permanence of their cherished pride and prejudice of race; they are, more or less consciously afraid that the antipathy upon which they rely may become weakened and eventually dissipated by close contact of the two races in places where economic pressure has reduced both to the same level of life. We shall do well to remember the words of Renan when we try to estimate the truth of this matter, "La verité consiste dans les nuances," for both estimates may be true; the racial instinct may have to yield here and there to the superior force of economic pressure, and may yet in the main prove powerful enough to prevent the contact that tends to render it of no effect.