The constant question raised by these discriminating laws is: What is a Negro? When are we are going to discriminate against a fellow, we must be careful and definite in pointing him out. And so each set of discriminating laws contains its own definition of the word _Negro_, and the definitions have differed widely. At first in some parts of the North the Negro was defined as any person who was _visibly_ colored. It is plain, however, that if the matter is left to the eyes, millions of American "Negroes" will have to be taken into the Caucasian race,—and so most of the state legislatures reduced their definition to the finer discriminations of mathematics. These mathematical definitions vary all the way from one fourth of the blood of the black man to a mere one sixteenth; but some laws of the gallant South go so far as to say that if one has even one drop of Negro blood in his veins he is a Negro. Thus it is seen that "the Negro," so far as the United States are concerned, is an arbitrary creature of law and includes within its scope hundreds of thousands of people who by every law of God and nature and reason are members of the Caucasian race, principally Anglo-Saxons. For whatever the legal definition, it is the common practice in the United States to class as Negroes all persons known to have any part of Negro blood. The white American therefore ascribes the same potency to Negro blood which he ascribes to the blood of Jesus Christ,—that it only takes one drop "to make you whole." The statement needs no proof that there are thousands of people in America who are related to the Negro and do not know it, and others who know it but also know that its acknowledgment would not increase their comforts in life. It was especially necessary to define the term _Negro_ when the intermarriage laws were being considered. These queer laws have always had the support of the vast majority of white people, wherever the Negro has become a considerable part of the population, and especially after the Negro was freed. I call them "queer laws" because they always, in spirit and in effect if not in letter, tend to make the naturally honorable relation of marriage a worse crime than the naturally dishonorable practice of illicit intercourse,—which abuse, however, is practiced chiefly by the men of the stronger against the women of the weaker group. For this illicitness there is in practice no punishment, while the sure penalties of intermarriage range all the way from a fine of one hundred dollars to ten years in the penitentiary,—and the danger of still more horrible extra-legal penalties. There could be but one result of thus outlawing decency and tolerating indecency,—of putting honor under the foot of dishonor,—and that result has been attained in the United States: namely, millions of interracial illegitimates, and some admixture of Caucasian blood in at least nine-tenths of the American Negro group.