On the other hand, if the bright-haired children of the snow and foam be really sprung from such sable prognathous ancestors, then their divergence from the ancestral type most certainly began untold millenniums ago, and the present organic departure from that type is measured, as it were, by the measureless chasm of years that divides them from their African forebears. Now, if nature and the tide of time have spent such centuries of centuries in chiseling out this chasm, how infinitely preposterous to suppose that man can close it up in a generation with the filmy webs of common culture and social equality and civil rights and partisan legislation and caricatured religion and the political spoils of the country post-office! As well expect to rise from the floor to the roof without ever traversing the intervening space. CHAPTER FOUR PLEA AND COUNTERPLEA _Who aught adjudges ere both sides are heard, Just though his judgement, is himself unjust._ SENECA By far the ablest plea yet made for the "backward races" is to be found in the address of Dr. Franz Boas on Human Faculty as Determined by Race, published (at least, printed) in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1894. This distinguished anthropologist, now of Columbia University, New York City, speaks from the pinnacles of science, and his words must not go unregarded. We shall notice every salient point in his twenty-six pages, and shall quote him verbatim as far as possible. Such a formal defence seems to call for an equally formal rejoinder. He objects to the argument from the superiority of the White civilization to the superiority of the White race as involving two errors: (_a_) "the achievement and the aptitude for an achievement have been confounded", (_b_) "every deviation from the white type is considered a characteristic feature of a lower type" (p. 302). It is declared that "these two errors underlie our judgments of races;" but why and whether they are really errors, or in what measure, here at least no attempt is made to show. This will not do. Such plausible assumptions are neither disproved nor discredited by merely labeling them "errors." However, there follows: "It might be objected that although achievement is not necessarily a measure of aptitude, it seems admissible to judge the one by the other" (pp. 302-3). But why "objected"? Has any reason been opposed against which one could "object"? None whatever. We do object very seriously to the implication that already there has been advanced some argument. The word "objected" should be changed to "argued."