He had been reading a paper at some scientific meeting which we attended, a most earnest paper, full of deep feeling and some carefully selected facts. He spoke of the innate lazi- ness of the negro race, their inborn objection to work, their in- educability—very strong on this—but his deepest horror was "miscegenation." This he alluded to in terms of the utmost loathing, hardly mitigated by the statement that it was impossible.
"There is," he averred, "an innate, insuperable, ineradicable, universal race antipathy, which forever separates the negro from the white."
Ellador had her chance at him afterward, with quite a group about, and he was too polite or insufficiently ingenious to es- cape. First she asked him what was the market price of a good, ablebodied negro before the war; if it was not, as she had read, about a thousand dollars. To this he agreed unsuspectingly. She inquired, further, if there had not been laws in the slave States forbidding the education of negroes, and if there were not laws still forbidding their intermarriage with whites. To this he agreed also; he had to. Then she asked whether the sudden emancipation of the negro had not ruined many rich men; if the major part of the wealth of the South had not been in slaves and the products of their labor. Here again could be no denial.
"But," she said, "I do not understand, yet. If negroes can not or will not work, why was one worth a thousand dollars? And how could the owners have accumulated wealth from their in- efficiency? If they could not learn anything, why was it neces- sary to make laws forbidding their education; and if there is this insuperable antipathy separating the races, why are the laws against miscegenation needed ?" He was quite naturally incensed. There were a good many of his previous hearers about, some of them looking quite pleased, and he insisted rather stormily that there was this deep-seated antipathy, and that every Southerner, at least, knew it.
"At what age does it begin ?" she asked him. He looked at her, not getting the drift of her question.
"This innate antipathy," she pursued gently. "I have seen the Southern babies clinging to their black nurses most affection- ately. At what age does the antipathy begin ?" He talked a good bit then, with much heat, but did not seem to meet the points she raised, merely reiterating much of what he had said before. Then she went on quite calmly.
"And your millions of mulattos—they appear, not only against the law, but against this insuperable antipathy?"
This seemed to him so unwomanly of her, that he made some hasty excuse and got away, but his position was upheld by an- other man, for a monent. His little speech was mainly emotion,
there are such hot depths of feeling on this subject in the chil- dren of slave owners that clear reasoning is naturally hard to find. This man made a fine little oration, with much about the noble women of the South, and how he, or any man, would lay down his life to protect them against the faintest danger of so- cial contact with the colored race, against the abomination of a proposal of marriage from a black man.
"Do you mean," said Ellador slowly, her luminous eyes on his, "that if black men were free to propose to white women, the white women would accept them?"
At this he fairly foamed with horror. "A white woman of the South would no sooner marry a black man than she would a dog."
"Then why not leave it to the women ?" she inquired.
Neither of these men were affected, save in the way of deep annoyance, by Ellador's gentle questions, but many of her hearers were, and she, turning that searchlight of hers on the subject, later announced to me that it seemed rather a long but by no means a difficult problem.
"About ten million negroes, counting all the mulattos, quardroons, octaroons and so on, to about ninety million whites," she said.
"As a mere matter of interbreeding, following the previous habits of the white men, it could be worked out mathematic- ally—how long it would take to eliminate the negro, I mean."
"But suppose there remains a group of negroes, that have race pride and prefer to breed true to the stock," I suggested. "What then?"
"If they are decent, orderly and progressive, there is no prob- lem, surely. It is the degraded negro that is so feared. The an- swer to that is easy. Compulsory and efficient education, suit- able employment at fair wages, under good conditions —why, don't you see, dear," she interrupted herself to say, "the proof that it is not impossible is in what has been accomplished already. Here you white people wickedly brought over the ocean a great lot of reluctant black ones, and subjected them to several generations of slavery. Yet in those few generations these previously savage people have made noble progress."
She reeled off to me a list of achievements of the negro race, which I found surprising. Their development in wealth, in industry, in the professions, even the arts, was, considering the circumstances, astonishing.
"All you have to do is to improve the cultural conditions, to increase the rate of progress. It's no problem at all."
"You are a wonder," I told her. "You come out of that little far away heaven of yours, and dip into our tangle of horror and foolishness, and as soon as the first shock is over, you proceed to admister these little doses of wisdom, as if a mere pill or two would set the whole world straight."
"It would," said Ellador, "if you'd take it." "Do you mean that seriously?" I demanded.
"I do. Why not ? Why, Van—you've got all the necessary in- gredients for peace and happiness. You don't have to wait a thousand years to grow. You're here. It's just a little matter of—behaving differently."
I laughed. "Exactly, my dear. And in Herland, so far as I make out, you behave accordingly to your perceptions and de- cisions. Here we don't."
"No," she admitted, grudgingly, "You don't, not yet. But you could" she persisted, triumphantly. "You could in a minute, if you wanted to."
I ducked this large proposition, and asked her if she had an 'answer to the Jewish race question as simple as that of the negro.
"What's the question ?" she countered.
"I suppose there's more than one question involved," I answered slowly, "but mine would be: why don't people like Jews?"
"I wont be severe with your question, Van, though it's open to criticism. Not all people feel this race prejudice. And I'll tell you frankly that this is a bigger wide spread. It has deeper roots. I've one than the other. It's older. It's more looked into it—a little ?"
I grinned. "Well, you young encyclopaedia, what did you discover?"
"I soon discovered that the very general dislike to this one people is not due to the religious difference between them and Christians; it was quite as general and strong, apparently, in very ancient times."
"Do you think it is a race feeling, then, an 'insuperable, in- eradicable,' etc., antipathy."
"No," she said, "there are other Semitic and allied races to whom there is no general objection. I don't think it can be that. I have several explanations to suggest, of varying weight. Here's one of them. The Jews are the only surviving modern people that have ever tried to preserve the extremely primitive custom of endogenous marriage. Everywhere else, the exogen- ous habit proved itself best and was generally accepted. This people is the only one which has always assumed itself to be superior to every other people and tried to prevent intermar- riage with them."
"That's twice you've said 'tried," I put in. "Do you mean that'they have not succeeded?"
"Of course they haven't," she replied, cheerfully. "When people endeavor to live in defiance of natural law, they are not as a rule very successful."
"But, they boast the purity of their race——"
"Yes, I know they do, and other people accept it. But, Van, dear, surely you must have noticed the difference between, say, the Spanish and the German Jews, for instance. Social con- tract will do much in spite of Ghettos, but it hardly alters the color of the eyes and hair."
"Well, my dear, if it is not religion, nor yet race, what is it?" "I have two other suggestions, one sociologic, one psychic.
The first is this: In the successive steps of social evolution, the Jewish people seem not to have passed the tribal stage. They never made a real nation. Apparently they can't. They live in other nations perforce."
"Why perforce ?" I interrupted.
"Well, if they don't die, they have to live somewhere, Van. And unless they go and set up a new nation in a previously un- inhabited country, or on the graves of the previous inhabitants, they have to live in other nations, don't they?"
"But they were a nation once," I urged.
"In a way,—yes. They had a piece of land to live on and they lived on it, as tribes, not as one people. According to their own account, ten out of twelve of these tribes got lost, somehow, and the others didn't seem to mind. No—they could not main- tain the stage of social organization rightly called a nation.
Their continuing entity is that of a race, as we see in far lesser instance in gypsies. And the more definitely organized peoples have, not a racial, but a sociological aversion to this alien form of life, which is in them, but not of them."
"But, Ellador, do not the modern Jews make good citizens in whatever country they are in?"
"They do, in large measure, wherever they are allowed," she agreed; "and both this difference and the old marriage differ- ence would long ago have been outgrown but for the last one—the psychic one."
"Do you mean what that writer in Blackwoods said about Spain: "There seems to be something Spanish in the minds of Spaniards which causes them to act in a Spanish manner ?"
She laughed. "All of that, Van, and a lot more." She stopped, looking away toward the far horizon. "I never tire of the marvel and interest of your mixed humanity" she resumed. "You see we were just us. For two thousand years we have been one stock and one sex. It's no wonder we can think, feel, act as one. And it's no wonder you poor things have had such a slow, tu- multuous time of it. All kinds of races, all kinds of countries, all kinds of conditions, and the male sex to manage everything. Why, Van, the wonder is that before this last worldquake of war, you could travel about peaceably almost anywhere, I un- derstand. Surely that ought to prove, once and for all how safe and quiet the world might be."
"But about the Jews?" I urged at last.
"Oh, yes. Well, dear, as I see it, people are moving on to a wide and full mutual understanding, with peace, of course, free trade and social intercourse and intermarriage, until everyone is what you call civilized. Against this process stood first total ignorance and separation. Then opposing interests. Then op- posing ideas. To-day it is ideas that do the most damage. Look at poor Europe. Every interest calls them together but their diffenent mental content holds them apart. Their egregiously false histories, their patriomanias, their long-nursed hatreds and vengeances—oh it is pathetic."
"Yes—and the Jews?"
"Oh dear me, Van, they're only one people. I get so inter- ested in the world at large that I forget them. Well, what the Jews did was to make their patriomania into a religion."
I did not get that and said so.
"It was poorly put," she admitted. "They couldn't be patrio- maniacs without a fatherland, could they? But it was the same feeling at a lower stage, applied only to the race. They thought they were 'the chosen people'—of God."
"Didn't other races think the same thing ? Don't they yet ?" I urged.
"Oh in a way, they do—some of them. Especially since the Jews made a Bible of it. You see, Van, the combination was pe- culiar. The special talent of this race is in literary expression. Other races had their sorrows but could not utter them. Carthage had no Jeremiah; nor has Armenia."
She saw that I was impressed by this point.
"You have Greece in its sculpture, its architecture and its ob- jective literature. Even Greek history is a story told by an artist, a description. Rome lives in its roads, I have read, as well as its arts and its power of social organization. Rome, if it could have survived its besetting sins, was a super-nation, the beginning of a real world people. Egypt, India,—they all have something, but none of them concentrated on literature as the Jews did, having no other social expression."
"Why Ellador, don't you call their religion anything? Haven't they lifted the world with great religious concepts?"
She smiled at me, that gentle warm, steady smile of hers. "Forgive an outsider, please. I know that the Christian religion rests on the Jewish books, and that it hard indeed to see around early teachings. But I have read your Bible carefully, and some little of the latest study and criticism upon it. I think the Christian races have helped the Jews to overestimate their religion."
"You've never said much about our various religions, my fair foreigner, What do you really think about them?"
This she pondered carefully.
"It's a large subject to try to comment on in a few words, but I can say this— they are certainly improving."
I had to laugh. This was such faint praise for our highest institution.
"How do you measure them, O casual observer ?"
"By their effect upon the people, of course. Naturally, each set of believers holds its own to be the All True, and as naturally that is impossible. But there is enough truth and enough good will in your religions if you would only use them, instead of just believing them."
"And do you not think, especially considering the time of its development, that the Jewish concept of one God, the Jewish ethical ideal, was a long step upward ?"
"It was a step, certainly, but, Van, they did not think their God was the only one. He was just Theirs. A private tribal God, openly described as being jealous of the others. And as to their ethics and the behavior of the people—you have only to read their own books to see how bad it was. Van, no religion can be truly good where the initial doctrines are false, or even partly false. That utterly derogatory concept of a God who could curse all humanity because of one man's doing what he knew he would, a God so petty as to pick out one small people for no better reason than that they gave him some recognition, and to set his face against all the rest of his equally descended 'chil- dren'— can't you see how unethical, how morally degrading, such a religion must be ?"
