“That’s true,” the hostess admitted promptly. “And I daresay you are not the only one that is surprised and not too approving of my friendship with Sên King-lo.” “Oh, I hope I didn’t even hint that!” “You didn’t mean to, I’m sure. But you felt it. And,” she added dryly, “you did rather hint that my Chinese guest was not good enough for Uncle Lysander.” “Oh—” Ivy began—and broke off lamely with, “I wish I’d held my tongue.” “I don’t,” Miss Julia told her. “We may as well get it clear. There are two parts to it: the very different attitude of my mind to the darkies and to Asiatics, and my personal regard for Mr. Sên individually. I love my negroes, just as I love my dogs and all horses. In a certain way, or rather in certain ways, I respect them—sometimes, some of them. I respect their loyalty, when they are loyal. (Mine have to be, or go.) But the best of them are a cross between babies and useful domestic animals. The negro race has no past, and will have no future. It has certain knacks of mind, but no intellect. It is of peasant breed through and through. Lysander and Peter probably would be eating each other, or breakfasting off Dinah this very day, and doing it stark naked somewhere in Africa, if their ancestors had not been captured, carried over here, and sold as slaves to my ancestors. The nigger rose to his highest place and development under the rule of the Southern master. What’s going to happen to him now? One of three things. Either he’ll die out, starved to death by his own laziness and exterminated by consumption; or he’ll deteriorate into a despised and despicable, contemptibly employed pariah, crushed and wretched, his hand against every one of us, and most of all against himself; or he’ll ruin this country and exterminate _us_. He can teach us nothing and the North-fangled teaching is going to corrupt him and corrupt him very far and very fast. It isn’t a matter of skin, I tell you, it isn’t a matter of color; it is a matter of character, of mind and of social fitness—the difference between the negroes and the Asian. Asia can teach us a great deal. And some of us are just beginning to suspect it. Sên King-lo’s ancestors were _gentlemen_, and were scholars and statesmen and artists when yours and _mine_ were living in a tadpole state of human existence. We have risen—you and I. The darkies can’t rise—not an inch higher than they have. We never—if we’ve got a sane hair on our head—can treat the negroes as our equals; for the reason that they never by any possibility or miracle can rise to or approach equality. They can go down, in my opinion they will—but they never, never can go up—any farther. Many Asiatic peoples had ‘gone up’ very far when we were still wallowing. Not many of us Americans know this—or are willing to realize it. I happen to. They are _different_ from us. They are _not_ inferior. Now, about Mr. Sên—individually about him. When he first came here the present running after yellow officials had not begun.