ing with black men, so that the observed tendency towards the
diffusion of the coloured element back into the parent streams will be
allowed to continue.

But let us for a moment look calmly, and as far as possible without
prejudice, at the people who in South Africa are said to furnish the
awful example of the alleged evil of the crossing of white and black.
The fact that the denunciation of these people is based on opposite and
contradictory arguments shows that it is not the result of clear
thinking. On the one side it is vehemently asserted that the coloured
man is a physiological misfit, a sort of hybrid unfit for the society
of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind
is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said,
with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, unfit to
mingle with the pure parental breeds, and that this is proved by their
excessive fecundity. The coloured people are also accused of being
inferior in physical constitution when compared with either of the
parent races, and therefore undesirable.

My own observations, corroborated by the opinions of many other
observers, leads me to believe that the fecundity of the coloured people
is neither greater nor less than that of other people--white, black or
yellow--whose birthrate is not artificially restricted, and that their
general physical constitution, when not undermined by disease or stunted
by underfeeding, is as strong as that of any other human variety. The
great naturalist, Wallace, has insisted that some degree of difference
favours fertility, but that a little more tends to infertility, and by
applying this hypothesis to the facts as I have observed them I am led
to believe that there is no biological difference between the Bantu and
the European of a degree sufficient to produce any difference, one way
or the other, in the fertility of the offspring of the two races, but
proper statistics, continued over several generations, will, of course,
be required to prove or disprove this conclusion.

The gravest, and, as I think, the most unjust of the many charges
brought against these people by an unthinking public, is that the
half-caste, wherever he is found, partakes of all the vices but of none
of the virtues of his parents. When we remember that in the towns of
South Africa the coloured people of necessity form the class that in the
nature of things is peculiarly exposed to the t