"MISCEGENATION."
TONDON has recently been interesting itself in an attempt 4 to prevent a marriage between Loben, one of the Zulus at Earl's Court, and an educated white woman. The attempt failed, of course, there being no law against such unions, if women are fools enough to contract them, and it is a little difficult to explain satisfactorily the horror, rather than disgust, with which alliances between the colours are regarded, and rightly regarded, both in England and America. That horror is nearly or quite universal among the cultivated of these two countries, and is in part shared by the present writer, but he finds it difficult to give a perfectly satisfactory reason for it. The one usually offered, that it is an instinct, probably of extreme antiquity, can hardly be accepted. An antipathy, it is true, must have existed for thousands of years, or the colours would not have separated so completely, no race truly black being discoverable outside Africa and a few islands ; but the antipathy cannot have been an instinct. If such an instinct existed it would extend to illicit connections, and it does not, as is proved by the number of brown persons in the West Indies and the Southern States of the Union, and of Eurasians in India and Ceylon. Indeed, the horror is said not to be fully shared by our own lower classes, the black servants once so common in great houses having disappeared into the population, while in all ports white women who speak English occasionally marry coloured sailors. Legitimate unions of the kind are not uncommon in Spanish America, while there are hundreds of families in France whose heads hardly affect to conceal that they are of the same hybrid race as Damao. There is a deep tinge or taint of dark blood in Southern Portugal, in Sicily, and among the whites of Brazil, while in Hayti, Cuba, and the Philippines the half-castes constitute a numerous and most prominent section of the population. The theory of instinct must, therefore, be given up, and it is not easy to find another. Difference of creed is not sufficient to account for the horror, for in neither America nor the West Indies does such difference exist ; nor is it quite honest to 'adduce the savagery, whether real or suspected, of the darker partners in such a union. No cultivated Englishman or American could endure that his brother or sister should marry a coloured woman or man even if they were Christian, • civilised, and cultivated, as many of them are. The objection is to the colour, not to the want of refine- nient, and it is as deeply seated as it is inexplicable. There is not a missionary of all the hundreds who ate spending their lives in converting the coloured races who wOuld not be deeply pained if a daughter married one of the converts, or who would not exert his whole energy in
dissuading a son from making such a sacrifice of his nobler nature. Nor will difference of grade explain it, for it is felt in cases where the grade of the coloured man or woman is far higher than that of his or her partner, so high indeed that the social condescension is entirely on the coloured side. If all legends on the subject are not false, Europeans in Northern India once kidnapped a white lady, and conveyed her in durance to Australia, to prevent her marriage with a Rajah of high degree, and we have heard the fiercest disgust expressed when the bride was of the house of Timonr, the descendant of twenty Emperors. The rooted distaste, amounting to scorn, for the children produced by such unions has, no doubt, something to do with the matter, but we do not believe it has much, or that it will account for a horror which in many cases is entirely beyond the control of the reason, even when, as often happens among missionaries and philanthropists, the man who feels it is thoroughly ashamed of his own feelings.
The true cause of the "prejudice," concealed rather than modified by such circumstances as creed, savagery, or pedigree, is pride of caste. The white man, being supported in his faith by the whole history of the world, believes firmly, often without reasoning about it, that his colour marks him out as belonging to the hereditary aristocracy of mankind, and regards any degradation to that aristocracy as a kind of personal insult, to be prevented if possible, and if not, bitterly resented. A marriage between the colours affirms in a way the equality of the colours, and he cannot endure the affirma. tion. The aristocracies of the world used to feel like that when no question of colour was involved, and the Royalties not only feel it but avow it even now. Amadeo of Spain was driven from his throne by the slights passed by the great Spanish ladies upon his wife because she was not quite com- pletely Royal, and the whole history of Eastern Europe has been affected by the fact that a family, supposed in England to be Royal, is not admitted to be such by the dynasts of the Continent. The dislike to mixed marriages is the extreme form of the common dislike to mesalliances, with this special intensification, that no inequality between persons of the same race can approach in degree to the inequality between races separated by colour. That in- equality may in the course of ages pass away or become imperceptible, and it has, of course, even now a thousand steps or gradations, but for the present it exists, and a defiance of it involves in a far more acute degree the same degradation as an excessively unequal marriage does. The lady who marries her groom is almost invariably degraded by her marriage, and if the groom is black the degradation is deeper. The assertion that the horror differs in kind from fierce caste pride can hardly be sustained by those who believe that all mankind had a common ancestor, but it certainly differs in degree. How can it be otherwise if there is anything in heredity at all, or if there is any reason for the continual advance of the white man in intelligence and moral culture, and for the stationary position through so many ages of the black?
We write without prejudice, for we feel bound as historians to question in part the accuracy of one deeply rooted belief upon this subject. The extreme dislike of Englishmen and Americans for the half-caste races is intelligible, for it is founded upon a wide though imperfect experience. That the majority of modern half-castes are inferior in several respects to both the races which produce them may be true enough—though it is often quite false—and is to be expected, for they are the progeny of illicit connections, and brought up under circumstances which take the bone out of the character, but that a half-caste nation would be necessarily a base nation either in intelligence or character is by no means proved. The verdict of history is rather the other way. It is as certain as any fact of the kind can be that the Brahmins of India and the clans of Rajpootana descend from white invaders, who, crossing the passes, left their wives behind, and settling in India, intermarried with the dark races of the plains. No people on earth can claim to be more intelligent than the Brahmins, and hardly any exhibits a finer character than the Rajpoot, who is, moreover, in physique one of the superior races of mankind. He is often as beautiful as the Norseman or the Greek, though slightly darker than either. It is more than probable that the Parsee is another example, and if Mr. E. de Bunsen may be believed, the Jew is a third. The accusation of cowardice brought against the hybrid race rests upon no evidence whatever, and is utterly opposed to the record alike of Rajpoots and Ghoorkas—who are Rajpoots with a Mon- golian cross—while it is, we believe, denied by all American officers who have commanded "black" regiments. There is, it is time, no nation sprung from the cross between the white man and the negro, but the half-Arab, half-negro tribes of the Eastern Soudan are braver than most Europeans, and, as Rudya.rd Kipling has informed every- body, once " broke a British square." The mixture of the colours cannot, therefore, be pronounced injurious to the world, though as a rule it is injurious to the individual family. It is strange, we may conclude by saying, that while the subject is so interesting, as well as important, no sufficient light has yet been thrown upon the cause of colour. Physicians are beginning, we see, to revert to the old doctrine that it was originally due to climate, animals in the hot regions of the earth being black under their hair or wool, but the evidence is imperfect, and while all the truly white races have started from temperate climes, one black race at least, the Tasmanian, was found in a land which, as is proved by the evidence of the heaps of clam-shells on the coast, he must have inhabited for three thousand years, and which is as temperate as Great Britain.
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