to us, which it is both unmanly and bestial to violate.  Especially I would plead with mothers to send us pure men for our army—­officers who will set their men a high example of chivalry towards the weakest native woman, and who will so influence them by example and personal influence that they may look upon voluntarily disabling themselves from active service, while still taking the government pay, as unmanly and unsoldierly.  Give us men who can say with a non-commissioned officer writing home to one of our White Cross secretaries:  “I have been out in India now eleven years and have never had a day’s illness; and I think the whole secret of my good health is total abstinence from all that intoxicates, and that I honor all women as I honor my mother or any of my sisters.”

Thirdly, the hardest thing on earth is not to slay a sin, but to get it buried; and the hardest of all sins to get under ground is the sin of impurity.  It is largely due to the low standard of purity among men that we owe the almost insoluble problem presented by the existence of the large Eurasian population in India, and of the half-caste generally.

“The universal unanimity of the popular verdict on the half-caste is remarkable,” says Olive Schreiner in some powerful articles published in Blackwood on the problems presented by our Colonial Empire.  “The half-caste, it is asserted in every country where he is known, whether it be in America, Asia, or Africa, and whether his ancestors be English and negroid Spanish and Indian, or Boer and Hottentot,—­the self-caste is by nature anti-social.  It is always asserted that he possesses the vices of both parent races and the virtues of neither:  that he is born especially with a tendency to be a liar, cowardly, licentious, and without self-respect.”

Olive Schreiner herself is the first to admit that there are exceptions.  She says: 

“The fact that amongst the most despised class of our laboring half-castes we have all met individuals, not only of the highest integrity, but of rare moral beauty and of heroic and fully developed social feelings, does not impugn the theory of his unfortunate position.  If you should sow human seed inside the door of hell, some of it would yet come up white lilies.  But as a rule the popular verdict on the half-caste is not overdrawn.”

I strongly agree with Mrs. Schreiner that this lamentable result is not due solely, or even chiefly, to the admixture of races, but far more to the circumstances in which he has been born and bred.  He has originated in almost all cases, not from the union of average individuals of the two races uniting under average conditions, but as the result of a sexual union between the most helpless and enslaved females of the dark race and the most recklessly dominant males of the white.  “He enters a world in which there was no place prepared for him.”  His father was about as sensible of his parental obligations