the nobility of Dahomey, where
primogeniture rules. Written laws and records are unknown. The people
are unstable, indifferent to suffering, and "easily aroused to ferocity
by the sight of blood or under great fear." They exhibit aversion to
silence and solitude, love of rhythm, excitability, and lack of reserve.
All travellers speak of their impulsiveness, strong sexual passion, and
lack of will power.[11]

Such, in brief, were the land and the people that furnished one-sixth of
our total population and two-fifths of our Southern population. In
shifting such a people from the torrid climate of equatorial Africa to
the temperate regions of America, and from an environment of savagery to
one of civilization, changes more momentous than those of any other
migration have occurred. First, it was only the strongest physical
specimens who survived the horrible tests of the slave catcher and the
slave ship. Slavery, too, as a system, could use to best advantage those
who were docile and hardy, and not those who were independent and
feeble. Just as in the many thousand years of man's domestication of
animals, the breechy cow and the balky horse have been almost eliminated
by artificial selection, so slavery tended to transform the savage by
eliminating those who were self-willed, ambitious, and possessed of
individual initiative. Other races of immigrants, by contact with our
institutions, have been civilized--the negro has been only domesticated.
Democratic civilization offers an outlet for those who are morally and
intellectually vigorous enough to break away from the stolid mass of
their fellows; domestication dreads and suppresses them as dangerous
rebels. The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are
essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged
from the negro race through two hundred years of slavery. And then, by
the cataclysm of a war in which it took no part, this race, after many
thousand years of savagery and two centuries of slavery, was suddenly
let loose into the liberty of citizenship and the electoral suffrage.
The world never before had seen such a triumph of dogmatism and
partizanship. It was dogmatism, because a theory of abstract equality
and inalienable rights of man took the place of education and the slow
evolution of moral character. It was partisanship, because a political
party, taking advantage of its triumph in civil war, sought to
perpetuate itself through the v