society intervenes in the interest of the community to restrain him. Society isolates the insane or the morally degenerate. This is the simplest form of the problem.

The situation becomes much more difficult when we have fundamental racial differences produced by natural selection operating under widely divergent conditions of environment. In view of the intimate and organic relations between the child of AngloSaxon ancestry and the democratic institutions to which he falls heir at birth it would seem at least plausible that his social instincts would further a more immediate and thorough sympathy with those institutions than is possible in the case of the Chinese or negro child which inherits race instincts shaped by a totally different race history. The problem is one that we shall consider in a later chapter. We remark in passing that writers divide into two schools according as they emphasise the psychological and plastic or the biological and hereditary elements. The psychological school asserts or implies the essential identity of instincts and mental capacities among all races. They call attention also to the plasticity and adaptiveness of man which enable him to assimilate any social heritage so that the limit of his attainments is to be found in the possibilities of the civilisation in which he is born rather than in heredi

tary powers. The biological school, following the lead of Galton, lays emphasis upon the hereditary elements.

Undoubtedly the facts of profoundest significance for the understanding of the phenomena of race friction in American democracy are those connected with the genesis and growth of personality. We have already suggested that personality develops through the imitative absorption of the social heritage by the individual. It will be influenced very materially, therefore, by the character of the social setting and the extent to which the individual is permitted to share in it. De Tocqueville, with keen insight into the genius of American democracy, long ago observed that the intent of its free institutions is to place at the disposal of the individual all the potentialities possible for the unfolding of his personality. "The free institutions which the inhabitants of the United States possess, and the political rights of which they make so much use, remind every citizen, and in a thousand ways, that he lives in society. They every instant impress upon him the notion that it is the duty as well as the interest of men to make themselves useful to their fellows." Hence "there is no man who does not feel the value of the public good will, or who does not endeavour to court it by drawing to himself the esteem and affection of those amongst

whom he is to live." Any distinction of class or caste therefore must result in defeating the purpose of free, democratic institutions, by stunting and starving the personalities of the group discriminated against. For, as has been well said, "The individual cannot become a full adult and a capable person in any sense without becoming also by the same movement social and solid with his fellows." This is a fact of fundamental importance.

2

The source of race friction in American democracy should now be evident. It is found in the refusal of the dominant racial group to admit members of other widely divergent racial groups to the full enjoyment of those indispensable means for the attainment of the completest selfhood which the community offers. The discontent aroused by such discriminations is inevitable and to a very large measure justifiable. It arises from the feeling that the actual facts are a bare-faced stultification of the intent and claim of American democracy. Lecky, writing of the revolutionary fathers, speaks of "the grotesque absurdity of slave-owners signing a Declaration of Independence which asserted the inalienable right of every man to liberty and equality." He might also criticise the "grotesque

1 Democracy in America, II, pp. 109, 110, 112.

2 Baldwin, The Individual and Society, p. 77.

3 History of England in the Eighteenth Century, VI, p. 282.

absurdity" of their descendants championing a democracy which claims to give freedom and equality to all while placing several millions of its citizens under social and civil disabilities which make the enjoyment of these democratic privileges impossible.

The effect of this upon the negro is unfortunate. In particular the negro "intellectuals," who have powers that enable them to appropriate the social heritage of their time, complain bitterly of the starving of personality which results when they are debarred from the complete enjoyment of privileges necessary to their highest spiritual development. This is the secret of the undertone of pessimism that runs through the utterances of Dr. DuBois and his school. Here too must be sought the explanation of their implied or openly avowed claim to social equality and racial intermarriage. They seem to feel that only with this can come the complete socialisation of the negro prerequisite to the attainment of the highest cultural level by the group as a whole. What is objected to is not so much the right of individuals of the dominant race to reject him as the right of society as a whole to debar him from complete social solidarity solely because of race.

On the other hand, there is a determination on the part of the white, now fairly pronounced in every section, expressed sometimes in definite legal restric

tions or in those equally effective unwritten laws that go to determine status, to debar the negro as a group from this complete social solidarity. To what extent this is based upon unreasoning prejudice or to what extent it is due to an instinctive and justifiable effort to safeguard the social heritage of the white, we are not now concerned to say. Right or wrong, it is the crux of the negro problem. All minor complications, political, social, educational, moral, or religious, centre around this fundamental fact. It may be frankly admitted that the hopelessness of any sort of a solution that is more than a modus vivendi is due primarily to this stubborn resistance of the white group to complete social assimilation of the negro. This is recognised in the title, and on every page, of M. W. Ovington's recent interesting study of the social status of the negro in New York City, entitled Half a Man.

Negro reformers and leaders such as Booker T. Washington seem to recognise this fact in their efforts to uplift their race. They have consciously set for themselves the task of creating among the negroes themselves, more or less independent of the social and moral traditions of the whites, group ideals and a social heritage which will insure a fitting environment for the attainment of a type of citizenship commensurate with the lofty demands of American democracy.