Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr.
- Haller, John S., Jr., 1940-
- Date:
- [1971]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Credit: Outcasts from evolution : scientific attitudes of racial inferiority, 1859-1900 / John S. Haller, Jr. Source: Wellcome Collection.
220/256 page 200
![200 • Outcasts from Evolution cegenation or loss of voting power, the government would more than likely turn to militarism. The franchise, therefore, ought to be guarded from both the half-civilized hordes of Europe and the inferior African race.^^^ The United States had enough difficulty assimilating the immi¬ grants flowing into eastern ports every year to attempt, in addition, to carry eight millions of dead material in the very centre of our vital organism. We breed our own poison in the slums of our great cities in sufficient abundance, he argued. Nor should the highest race compromise its accomplishments and posterity by mixing with the black. It would be a shameful sacrifice, fraught with evil to the entire species. It is an unpardonable sale of a noble birthright for a mess of potage. We cannot cloud or extinguish the fine nervous susceptibility, and the mental force, which cultivation develops in the constitution of the Indo-European, by the fleshy instincts, and dark mind of the African. . . . The greatest danger which flows from the presence of the negro in this country is the certainty of the contamination of the race.^^^ Reacting against the supporters of miscegenation. Cope reminded his readers that race mixture would cause a deterioration in the intellectual, moral, and political fiber of the nation. For that reason he favored the bill of Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama which sought to draw the lines of political separation as clear and as deep as is the Ипе of racial distinction between them.^^^ Morgan urged the United States to re-examine the Negro's qualifications to suffrage, control the privilege of voting, and secure, if possible, a happy home in the Philippine Archipelago to which [Negroes] would flock with rejoicings and grow into power beneath our flag.^^'^ The Caucasian, because of his much greater mental develop¬ ment, had become a more idealistic thinker than the rest of man¬ kind. But Cope warned that Caucasian idealism was a peril to 122 Edward Cope, What Is Republicanism? Open Court, X (Apr., 1896), 4899. 123 Cope, Two Perils, 2054. 124 John T. Morgan, Negro Suffrage in the South (Washington, D.C., 1900), 12; Morgan, The Race Question in the South, Arena, II (Sept., 1890), 385—98; Morgan, Shall Negro Minorities Rule? Forum, VI (Feb., 1889), 586-99. 125 Morgan, Negro Suffrage in the South, 16; Edward Cope, The Return of the Negroes to Africa, Open Court, III (Feb., 1890), 2331.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18025729_0221.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
