TOPICS of the DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume XXXIX, Issue 249, 17 October 1908, Page 11

TOPICS of the DAY.

(From Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, September ■!. W JUTES V. COLOURS. In view of the excesses to which racehatred has led, the white races in the United States and Conada, the letter written by Mr Basil Thomson to the "Times" a few days ago is rather interesting. Mr Thomson, whose experiences with the coloured races in Polynesia, gives him some claims to attention on this subject, declares that the prejudice between the white and coloured races, is neither inherited nor permanent. He says: — "It is felt most strongly in the United States and the West Indies, a lifje less strongly in the other British tropical colonies; in England it is sporadic, and generally confined to the educated classes, but in France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, it seems almost not to exist; and Germans in tropical countries do not generally appear to feel it." It is, according to Mr Thomson, a sentiment of modern growth, or Shakespeare would have provided Desdemona with a bridegroom of another breed, and Captain John Smith would not have married Poeahontas. He denies the prevailing ethnological dogma that half-caste offspring of mixed marriages have most of the vices of both races and none of the virtues. Apart from social ostracism, which "deteriorates some of them. !iis rather wide acquaintance with halfcastes convinces him that they are quite the equal of the white race, "where they have the same education and opportunities. Mr Thomson thinks that, as coloured men acquire, wealth and power, the colour line will cease to be. and to men of the future, the race riot of the twentieth century will seem no more sig-i nifieant than the anti-Semitic fury of the Middle Ages to us. As regards his Othello illustration, Mr Thomson has surely forgotten that Othello was a great military commander; Desdemona's father declared that, onlymagic could have made her "to wear a jreneral mock, run from her guardagc to the sooty bosom of such a thing as thou."