those limits:--the sooner we recognize as axiomatic these truths, the
quicker will be our progress towards the comprehension and satisfactory
solution of racial problems; and, failing to recognize these truths, it
is perhaps wholly useless for anyone to attempt to deal with the moral
and social aspects of inter-racial questions.
With perfect uniformity throughout the whole history of the human race
in the past, we find strong anti-sociality appearing at the point where
the light Aryan race comes into contact with darker races; and it
appears to make little difference which nations are concerned.
We Anglo-Saxons have the unhappy priority of having caused to the
natives of Africa, in our functions as slave-traders, slave-owners,
and explorers, probably more than fifty times as much suffering as
any other European nation. It appears, indeed, to have been our
unhappy prerogative to have been born to be the perpetual scourge
and torture of this vast, wonderful, attractive continent and its
interesting children. Probably at least fifty Africans have perished
under the lash, have borne the manacles, or been shot by the guns of
Anglo-Saxons, for every one that has been lashed, manacled, or shot by
a Frenchman, German, Spaniard, or European of any other variety; but
this has arisen, not at all because other nations were more socially
inclined towards the African, but because the love of material wealth
being dominant in us and trade our speciality, the African, whom all
white nations have regarded as mainly a means of producing or procuring
wealth, has naturally fallen most into our hands. Where Spaniard
has dealt with Indian, German, Frenchman or Dutchman with African
or Asiatic, exactly the same lack of lofty social feeling, and the
same mental attitude regarding them merely as means for production of
increased benefits for themselves, and not as individuals who are ends
within themselves, has prevailed.
Irrespective of nationality or time, the line at which light race meets
dark is the line at which human sociality is found at the lowest ebb;
and, wherever that line comes into existence, there are found the
darkest shadows which we humans have cast by our injustice and egoism
across life on earth.
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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