minutes.

And finally he concluded that, after all, morals and conventions, right
and wrong, are merely those precepts that a race have practised and
found good in its evolution. Morals are the training rules that keep a
people fit. It might very well be that one moral regime is applicable to
one race, and quite another to another.

The single object of all morals is racial welfare, the racial integrity,
the breeding of strong children to perpetuate the species. If the black
race possess a more exuberant vitality than some other race, then the
black would not be forced to practise so severe a vital economy as some
less virile folk. Racial morals are simply a question of having and
spending within safety limits.

Peter knew that for years white men had held a prejudice against
marrying widows. This is utterly without grounds except for one reason:
the first born of a woman is the lustiest. Among the still weaker Aryans
of India the widows burn themselves. Among certain South Sea Islanders
only the first-born may live and mate; all other children are slain.
Among nearly every white race marriage lines are strictly drawn, and the
tendency is to have few children to a family, to conserve the precious
vital impulse. So strong is this feeling of birth control that to-day
nearly all American white women are ashamed of large families. This
shame is the beginning of a convention; the convention may harden into a
cult, a law, or a religion.

And here is the amazing part of morals. Morals are always directed
toward one particular race, but the individual members of that race
always feel that their brand of morals does and should apply to all the
peoples of the earth; so one has the spectacle of nations sending out
missionaries and battle-ships to teach and enforce their particular
folk-ways. Another queer thing is that whereas the end of morals is
designed solely for the betterment of the race, and is entirely
regardless of the person, to the conscience of the person morals are
always translated as something that binds him personally, that will
shame him or honor him personally not only for the brief span of this
worldly life, but through an eternity to come. To him, his particular
code, surrounded by all the sanctions of custom, law, and religion,
appears earth-embracing, hell-deep, and heaven-piercing, and any human
creature who follows any other code appears fatally wicked, utterly
shameless, and ineluctably lost.

And ye