lled by instinctive
racial or sexual aversion but rather that women, as a whole, are, by
reason of their physical inability to dispute with men the ultimate
ratio of all order that lies in brute force, thoroughly amenable to the
rule of social conventions imposed upon them by their jealous masters. I
say this because we see that the aversion that has been inculcated from
without tends to disappear wherever the man-established conventions
lapse or cease to govern either through the comparatively small numbers
of black men being insufficient in certain localities to cause fear in
the white men living there, as in some seaport towns, or through the
temporary break-down of the customary standards of society brought about
by war and revolution, as in those parts of Germany that were recently
garrisoned by coloured soldiers.

Nature having cast upon the male the duty of winning and holding the
females of his species it is easy to see why the racial feelings of
jealousy and ill-will are more positive and more active in the man than
in the woman, and this explains, as far as these things can be
explained, why white men will allow themselves to cohabit freely with
black women to whom they feel naturally attracted but will "see red" and
commit murder as soon as they find a black man attempting to gain the
favour of a woman of their own colour. "Un adolescent aime toutes les
femmes" say the French, and it is generally accepted that man is by
nature more inclined to polygamy than woman is towards polyandry, still
man and woman are both swayed and motived by the same elemental jealousy
that is born of fear of losing something valued; the emotion which
Descartes has so well defined as "une espece de crainte qui se rapport
au desir qu'on a de se conserver la possession de quelque bien."

It is, no doubt, true that the thinking white woman, no less than the
thinking white man, is led to feel dismay and even resentment against
the Natives by apprehension of the possibility of danger to white
civilisation through fusion of white and black, but this is a feeling
caused by intelligent appreciation rather than by instinctive
apprehension, and as such liable to be dispelled by argument tending to
show that no real danger threatens. During a recent agitation against
miscegenation in Rhodesia a number of letters written by white women
appeared in the press from which it was easy to gather that the chief
concern of the writers was not the poss