"THE COLOUR LINE."

Timaru Herald, Volume XCIV, Issue 14388, 2 January 1911, Page 2

"THE COLOUR LINE."

▲ MODERN THING. Rev. C. F. Andrews, of Delhi, writing on the racial bar, has little mercy for the alleged "instinct in white man, and even more in tko white woman, which revolts against the id QU - °i marriage with au African as something unnatural." Ho answers: "There has not always been tho same racial repugnance, even in tho white race, as exists to-day, and among other races equally widely separated from the African there seemsr to bo no repugnance whatever. Historically our own strong Anglo-Saxon sentiment, which is far stronger than that of any other European race, does not appear to go back much beyond the seventeenth century. It is to a very largo extent a tradition of the old slave days. Among tho Greeks and Romans very few traces are to be found. Even today among many Europeans the colour prejudice simply does not exist. What Shakespeare, the truest diviner of human sentiment, thought al»ut it may he seen from the character of Desdemonu and her love for the Moor. It is Jago who appeals in bis own vile way to the colour mark. ,To Desdemona's sweetness and purity tlie nobility of her husband is'ajl in all. . . . We ourselves owe so much in England to race»itt}iture in the past that it is strange that we, above all others, should be the obempions of race segregation today. The fair-haired Saxon and the dark Iberian-Briton must have been poles apart originally. Again and again a fresh admixture gave strength to our stock instead of weakening it. Anthropologists are more and more agreed that such admixture adds variety and power."