Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the world? Even the
Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, not quite so entirely eligible
for extinction as a good, wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming
Australian white may think. These queer little races, the
black-fellows, the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little
gifts, a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or that,
a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that may serve as their
little unique addition to the totality of our Utopian civilisation.
We are supposing that every individual alive on earth is alive in
Utopia, and so all the surviving "black-fellows" are there. Every
one of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, a fair
education and fair treatment, justice, and opportunity. Suppose that
the common idea is right about the general inferiority of these
people, then it would follow that in Utopia most of them are
childless, and working at or about the minimum wage, and some will
have passed out of all possibility of offspring under the hand of
the offended law; but still--cannot we imagine some few of these
little people--whom you must suppose neither naked nor clothed in
the European style, but robed in the Utopian fashion--may have found
some delicate art to practise, some peculiar sort of carving, for
example, that justifies God in creating them? Utopia has sound
sanitary laws, sound social laws, sound economic laws; what harm are
these people going to do?
Some may be even prosperous and admired, may have married women of
their own or some other race, and so may be transmitting that
distinctive thin thread of excellence, to take its due place in the
great synthesis of the future.
And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, I see a little
figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, inky black, frizzy
haired, and clad in a white tunic and black hose, and with a mantle
of lemon yellow wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most
Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud of something, as
though he had no reason to be afraid of anything in the world. He
carries a portfolio in his hand. It is that, I suppose, as much as
his hair, that recalls the Quartier Latin to my mind.
Section 4
I had already discussed the question of race with the botanist at
Lucerne.
"But you would not like," he cried in horror, "your daughter to
marry a Chinaman or a negro?"
"Of course," said I, "when you say Chinaman, you think of a creature
with a pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you say
negro you think of a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat.
You do this because your imagination is too feeble to disentangle
the inherent qualities of a thing from its habitual associations."
"Insult isn't argument," said the botanist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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