a long and tedious process before the
equitable adjustment has been attained, but that does not much matter, as
full and fair enjoyment of civil and political rights requires much time
and patience and hard labor in any given situation, where two races come
together in the same governmental environment; such as is the case of the
Negro in America, the Irishman in Ireland, and the Jew everywhere in
Europe. It is just as well, perhaps, that the Negro will have to work out
his salvation under the Constitution as an individual rather than as a
race, as the Jew has done it in Great Britain and as the Irishman will
have to do it under the same Empire, as it is and has been the tendency of
our law and precedent to subordinate race elements and to exalt the
individual citizens as indivisible "parts of one stupendous whole." When
this has been accomplished by the law in the case of the Negro, as in the
case of other alien ethnic elements of the citizenship, it will be more
gradually, but assuredly, accomplished by society at large, the
indestructible foundation of which was laid by the reckless and brutal
prostitution of black women by white men in the days of slavery, from
which a vast army of mulattoes were produced, who have been and are,
gradually, by honorable marriage among themselves, changing the alleged
"race characteristics and tendencies" of the Negro people. A race element,
it is safe and fair to conclude, incapable, like that of the North
American Indian, of such a process of elimination and assimilation, will
always be a thorn in the flesh of the Republic, in which there is,
admittedly, no place for the integrality and growth of a distinct race
type. The Afro-American people, for reasons that I have stated, are even
now very far from being such a distinct race type, and without further
admixture of white and black blood, will continue to be less so to the end
of the chapter. It seems to me that this view of the matter has not
received the consideration that it deserves at the hands of those who set
themselves up as past grand masters in the business of "solving the race
problem," and in accurately defining "The Negro's Place in American Life
at the Present Day." The negroid type and the Afro-American type are two
very distinct types, and the sociologist who confounds them, as is very
generally done, is bound to confuse his subject and his audience.

It is a debatable question as to whether the Negro's present industr