XII.  RACE AVERSION

Max O’Rell once wrote that he did not understand how there could be such a thing as mulattoes in the world.  It is certainly safe to say that there are none such as a consequence of love.  The features, color, odor, tastes, and habits of one race have ever aroused the antagonism of other races and prevented the growth of that sympathy which is essential to love.  In a man strong passion may overcome the aversion to a more or less enduring union with a woman of a lower race, just as extreme hunger may urge him to eat what his palate would normally reject; but women seem to be proof against this temptation to stoop:  in mixed marriages it is nearly always the man who belongs to the superior race.  At first thought it might seem as if this racial aversion could not do much to retard the growth of free choice and love, since in early times, when facilities for travel were poor, the races could not mix anyway as they do now.  But this would be a great error.  Migrations, wars, slave-making and plundering expeditions have at all times commingled the peoples of the earth, yet nothing is more remarkable than the stubborn tenacity of racial prejudices.

“Count de Gobineau remarks that not even a common religion and country can extinguish the hereditary aversion of the Arab to the Turk, of the Kurd to the Nestorian of Syria, of the Magyar to the Slav.  Indeed, so strong, among the Arabs, is the instinct of ethnical isolation that, as a traveller relates, at Djidda, where sexual morality is held in little respect, a Bedouin woman may yield herself for money to a Turk or European, but would think herself forever dishonored if she were joined to him in lawful wedlock."[135]

We might suppose that the coarser races would be less capable of such aversions than the half-civilized, but the contrary is true.  In Australia nearly every tribe is the deadly enemy of every other tribe, and according to Chapman a Bushman woman would consider herself degraded by intercourse with anyone not belonging to her tribe.  “Savage nations,” says Humboldt, in speaking of the Chaymas of New Andalusia,

“are subdivided into an infinity of tribes, which, bearing a cruel hatred toward each other, form no intermarriages, even when their languages spring from the same root, and when only a small arm of a river, or a group of hills, separates their habitation.”

Here there is no chance for Leanders to swim across the waters to meet their Heros.  Poor Cupid!  Everybody and everything seems to be against him.

XIII.  MULTIPLICITY OF LANGUAGES