As the incident suggests, the color line is not a universal phenomenon. The Germans appear to have little aversion to receiving Negroes--_in Germany_--on terms of equality. These same Germans, when brought face to face with the question in their colonies, or in the southern United States, quickly change their attitude. Similarly a Negro in Great Britain labors under much less disadvantage than he does among the British inhabitants of Australia or South Africa. The color line therefore exists only as the result of race experience. This fact alone is sufficient to suggest that one should not dismiss it lightly as the outgrowth of bigotry. Is is not perhaps a social adaptation with survival value? The purpose of this chapter is to analyze society's "unconscious reasoning" which has led to the establishment of a color line--to the denial of social equality--wherever the white[129] and black races have long been in contact during recent history; and to see whether this discrimination appears to be justified by eugenics. J. M. Mecklin[130] summarizes society's logic as follows: "When society permits the free social intercourse of two young persons of similar training and interests, it tacitly gives its consent to the possible legitimate results of such relations, namely, marriage. But marriage is not a matter that concerns the contracting parties alone; it is social in its origin and from society come its sanctions. It is society's legitimatised method for the perpetuation of the race in the larger and inclusive sense of a continuous racial type which shall be the bearer of a continuous and progressive civilization. There are, however, within the community, two racial groups of such widely divergent physical and psychic characteristics that the blending of the two destroys the purity of the type of both and introduces confusion--the result of the blend is a mongrel. The preservation of the unbroken, self-conscious existence of the white or dominant ethnic group is synonymous with the preservation of all that has meaning and inspiration in its past and hope for its future. It forbids by law, therefore, or by the equally effective social taboo, anything that would tend to contaminate the purity of its stock or jeopardize the integrity of its social heritage." It is needless to say that the "social mind" does not consciously go through any such process of reasoning, before it draws a color line. The social mind rarely even attempts to justify its conclusions. It merely holds a general attitude of superiority, which in many cases appears to be nothing more than a feeling that another race is _different_. In what way different?