Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems: Expanded Edition

I. Race Questions and Prejudices

I race questions and prejudices  The numerous questions and prejudices which are aroused by the contact of the various races of men have always been important factors in human history. They promise, however, to become, in the near future, still more important than they have ever been before. Such increased importance of race questions and prejudices, if it comes to pass, will be due not to any change in human nature, and especially not to any increase in the diversity or in the contrasting traits of the races of men themselves, but simply to the greater extent and complexity of the work of civilization. Physically speaking, great masses of men are to-day brought into more frequent and closer contact than was formerly possible, because of the ease with which at present the numerous means of communication can be used, because of the increase of peaceful migrations, and because of the imperial ambitions of several of the world’s great peoples. Hence whatever contact, conflict, or mutual influence the races of men have had in the past, we find to-day more ways and places in which men find {  }  race questions and prejudices themselves in the presence of alien races, with whom they have to learn to live in the same social order. When we think of East Indian coolies now present as laborers, side by side with the native negroes, and with white men, in the British West Indies; when we remember the problem of South Africa, as it was impressed upon our minds a few years since, at a moment when Dutchmen and Englishmen fought for the land, while Kaffirs and Zulus watched the conflict; when we recall what the recent war between Japan and Russia has already meant for the future of the races of men in the far East; and when, with a few only of such typical instances in mind, we turn back to our own country, and think how many different race-problems confront us,—we then see that the earliest social problem of humanity is also the most recent problem. This is the problem of dealing with the men who seem to us somehow very widely different from ourselves, in physical constitution, in temperament, in all their deeper nature, so that we are tempted to think of them as natural strangers to our souls, while nevertheless we find that they are stubbornly there in our world, and that they are men as much determined to live as we are, and are men who, in turn, find us as incomprehensible as we find them. Of these diverse races, what ones are the superior and what ones are the inferior races? What race or races ought to rule? What ones ought to yield to their natural masters? To which one of these races has God, or nature, or destiny, ordained the rightful and final sovereignty of the earth? Which of these types of men is really the human type? Are they by their presence and their rivalry essentially perilous to one another’s interests? And if so, what one amongst them is there whose spread, or whose increase in power or in number, is most perilous to the true cause of civilization? Is it a ‘‘yellow peril,’’ or a ‘‘black peril,’’ or perhaps, after all, is it not rather some form of ‘‘white peril,’’ which most threatens the future of humanity in this day of great struggles and of complex issues? Are all men equal, as the Eighteenth Century theorists insisted? Or if the actual inequality of men in power, in value, in progressiveness, is an obvious fact, then how is this fact related to racial distinctions? race questions and prejudices  Such are a few of the questions that crowd upon us when we think about the races of men, and about their various relations to civilization . I do not mean, in this brief discussion, to exhaust any of these questions, but I want to call attention to a few principles which seem to me to be serviceable to any one who wants to look at race questions fairly and humanely. I It will be natural for some of my readers to interpose, at this point, the suggestion that the principal guidance in any attempt to answer such questions as the foregoing must come from an appeal to the results of the modern scientific study of the races...