MERGING OF RACES.

Taranaki Daily News, 10 September 1934, Page 4

MERGING OF RACES.

A suggestion raised by Lord Raglan at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science is likely to provoke serious thought and strong opposition to his conclusions. The suggestion was that the white and black races of the world might someday be merged into one. It is necessary, of course, to remember that with the scientist envisaging a type of mankind time is measured in long periods. Lord Raglan considers that before many centuries have elapsed there will be no person in the United States who will not have negro blood in his veins. Judging from current American social literature such a consummation will arrive only after white civilisation has gone under, though authorities admit that the problem of the hybrid is becoming more difficult as education spreads and the possibilities of segregation diminish. Taking the long view of the scientist—that is over a period of centuries—it is very difficult for any nation to plead purity of blood, as certain German politicians and their scientific cohorts have found during recent months. Nevertheless, the hybridisation of white and coloured races rarely tends to produce an improved type, at any rate in the early generations. In Australia there is a case on record of the marriage of a half caste Spanish-Manila man with a Welsh woman. The union was prolific, and the children, though slightly darker in complexion than the average white Australian, seemed in no way abnormal. Two of them at all events were accepted for service with the Australian expeditionary forces in the Great War, which proved that their physical standard was fairly high. Another son married a halfcaste Australian aborigine-Chinese woman and tire four strains were apparently unsuitable. Most of the children died, and those who lived showed more of the aboriginal and Mongolian blood than of the white grandmother. Their mentality was much below that of the ordinary white or half-caste child, and physically they were not prepossessing. The scientist would probably urge that Nature’s work of elimination of the unfit or unsuitable had already begun, but to the ordinary man the desire to keep the white race pure is more than ever confirmed by such a result of mixed breeding.