taken to represent fifty million people, and the law of averages thus obtained is confidently relied upon. Nor are we informed as to what methods were employed to ascertain the exact composition of blood of the 22 cases that are rated as one-sixteenth white. But, supposing we accept this table, overlooking for the time being the fact that the brain weight of one white person is taken as typical of two million others, and also conceding the undisclosed method of Dr. Hunt in detecting homeopathic dashes of white blood, does it “clearly prove that there is an increase in the brain weight with an increase in the proportion of white blood?” If this table shows anything it is that the pure Negro and the Mulatto have about the same brain weight and that they are both superior in this respect to all degrees of mixture between them, but inferior to those of more than one-half white blood.

But it is rather unusual at this late day to base intellectual capacity upon the shape and size of skull. Investigations have shown that facial angle and capacity of cranium and cephalic index afford no certain criterion of thought power or susceptibility to culture. The latest word on this subject is given by Prof. Ripley, in a series of articles on “Racial Geography of Europe,” in Appleton’s Popular Science Monthly for 1897.

“An important point to be noted in this connection is that this shape of the head seems to bear no direct relation to intellectual power or intelligence. Posterior development of the cranium does not imply a corresponding backwardness in culture.... Europe offers the best refutation of the statement that the proportions of the head mean anything intellectual.... In our study of the proportions of the head, therefore, we are measuring merely race, and not intelligence in any sense.... Equally unimportant to the anthropologist is the absolute size of the head. It is grievous to contemplate the waste of energy when, during our civil war, over one million of soldiers had their heads measured in respect to this absolute size, in view of the fact that today anthropologists deny any considerable significance attaching to this characteristic. Popularly a large head with beetling eyebrows suffices to establish a man’s intellectual credit, but like all other credit it is entirely dependent upon what lies on deposit elsewhere.”[43]

A still more renowned authority tells us: “The development of the intellectual faculties of man is to a great extent independent of the capacity of the cranium and the volume of the brain.”[44]

The question of the relative intellectual capacity of the different races is one of much speculative interest. I am giving the matter more attention than it would seem to warrant, because the author makes the supposed mental inferiority of the race the basis of the only practical suggestion which he has to offer, viz: that all of our educational and philanthropic endeavor so far has been based upon wrong principles, and a radical change in this regard is demanded so as to bring the treatment in harmony with the capabilities of the lower race. Several authorities will be cited which, I think, will be more than sufficient to offset Mr. Hoffman’s insistent opinion.

“There are hundreds if not thousands of black men in this country who in capacity are to be ranked with the superior persons of the dominant race; and it is hard to say that in any evident feature of mind they characteristically differ from their white fellow citizens.”[45]

Prof. Shaler is himself a Southerner, a professor in Harvard University, and a noted student of current problems.

“Granting the present inferiority of the Negro, we affirm that it has never been proved; nor is there any good reason to suppose that he is doomed forever to maintain his present relative position, or that he is inferior to the white man in any other sense than as some white races are inferior to others.”[46]

“Yet the Negro children exhibit no intellectual inferiority; they make just the same progress in the subjects taught as do the children of white parents, and the deficiency they exhibit later in life is of quite a different kind.”[47]

Mr. Hoffman compels us once more to combat the arguments of the slave holding class: that is, that the Negro is intellectually and morally an inferior creature (they did not, however, affirm physical inferiority) and that it is only by servile contact with the white race that his nature can be improved. The progress along these lines which the race has made even under the severest disadvantages is sufficient answer to this argument.

If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave,
By nature’s law designed,
Why was an independent wish
E’er planted in my mind?

The Negro’s intellectual and social environments hang as a millstone about his neck; and when he is cast upon the sea of opportunity he is reproached with everlasting inferiority because he does not swim an equal race with those who are not thus fettered. We are reminded of the barbarous Teutons in Titus Andronicus who, after pulling out the tongue and cutting off the hands of the lovely Lavinia, upbraid her for not calling for sweet water with which to wash her delicate hands.