And what a struggle it is! As I look out upon it and see this dark horde of men and women coming up, coming up, a few white men here and there cheering them on, a few bitterly holding them back, I feel that Port Arthur and the battles of Manchuria, bloody as they were, are not to be compared with such a conflict as this, for this is the silent, dogged, sanguinary, modern struggle in which the combatants never rest upon their arms. But the object is much the same: the effort of a backward race for a foothold upon this earth, for civilised respect and an opportunity to expand. And the Negro is not fighting Russians, but Americans, Germans, Irish, English, Italians, Jews, Slavs--all those mingling white races (each, indeed, engaged in the same sort of a struggle) which make up the nation we call America. The more I see of the conflict the more I seem to see that victory or defeat lies with the Negro himself. As a wise Negro put it to me: "Forty years ago the white man emancipated us: but we are only just now discovering that we must emancipate ourselves." Whether the Negro can survive the conflict, how it will all come out, no man knows. For this is the making of life itself. _PART THREE_ THE NEGRO IN THE NATION CHAPTER VIII THE MULATTO: THE PROBLEM OF RACE MIXTURE I had not been long engaged in the study of the race problem when I found myself face to face with a curious and seemingly absurd question: "What is a Negro?" I saw plenty of men and women who were unquestionably Negroes, Negroes in every physical characteristic, black of countenance with thick lips and kinky hair, but I also met men and women as white as I am, whose assertion that they were really Negroes I accepted in defiance of the evidence of my own senses. I have seen blue-eyed Negroes and golden-haired Negroes; one Negro girl I met had an abundance of soft straight red hair. I have seen Negroes I could not easily distinguish from the Jewish or French types; I once talked with a man I took at first to be a Chinaman but who told me he was a Negro. And I have met several people, passing everywhere for white, who, I knew, had Negro blood. Nothing, indeed, is more difficult to define than this curious physical colour line in the individual human being. Legislatures have repeatedly attempted to define where black leaves off and white begins, especially in connection with laws prohibiting marriage between the races. Some of the statutes define a Negro as a "person with one-eighth or more of Negro blood." Southern people, who take pride in their ability to distinguish the drop of dark blood in the white face, are themselves frequently deceived. Several times I have heard police judges in the South ask concerning a man brought before them: "Is this man coloured or white?"