We are compelled, in the first place, to study the vulgar verdict, which rough, ungeneralized human experience has recorded, and to see in how far any other evidence we can obtain sustains or opposes it. The universality and unanimity of the popular verdict on the Half-caste is remarkable. The Half-caste, it is asserted in every country where he is known, whether it be in America, Asia, or Africa, and whether his ancestors be English and Negroid, Spanish and Indian, or Boer and Hottentot--the Half-caste is by nature anti-social. It is always asserted that he possesses the vices of both parent races and the virtues of neither; that he is born especially with a tendency to be a liar, cowardly, licentious, and without self-respect. "You may catch a jackal among the bushes, but not a Half-caste when he doubles," says the Indian. "God made the white man, perhaps he made the black; but the devil made the Half-caste," says the South American. "The devil sits behind the ears of a Half-and-half," says the Boer proverb. "Who the white man is we know; and who we are we know," says the black Bantu to his Half-caste fellow-servant; "but what are you? Half-monkey whom no one can believe!" "The Half-caste as he creeps out of his mother's womb is a born liar," says the Colonial Englishman; "he is never a man." This unanimity of verdict demands our attention. Like the old faith that the earth was stationary and the sun moved round her, it would not be universally received were there not some specious appearances in its favour, though it need contain no necessary truth. Mankind is easily duped, but not without an adequate show of reason. In South Africa the truth of the assertion of the inherent depravity of Half-castes seems on the surface borne out to the full by facts. Three-fourths of the prostitutes who fill our brothels and lock-hospitals are "coloured," or Half-caste; only the remaining fourth are of pure breed.[29] In the smaller criminal cases tried in our Magistrates' Courts, the "coloured-man" figures out of all proportion to the pure-blooded Europeans, Bantus, or Malays. If you pass a gang of convicts clanking in their chains, you will find the number of tawny faces exceeds those pure white or black in a manner not warranted by their proportional numbers in the community. [29] Except in Johannesburg. On the whole, there can be no doubt as to the superficial appearance of strong anti-sociality on his part; the only debate which can arise in the mind being, as to whether this anti-sociality is inherent and the direct result of the mixture of bloods, or is an accident, dependent on external and changeable conditions.