At one point we passed a large truck crowded with half-naked negro navvies, who swarmed over it and clung on to it in every possible attitude, grinning, joking, indulging in horse-play, so far as their close quarters would allow—the very picture, in short, of good-humoured, muscular animalism. And in the middle of the swarm, penned in on every side, and yet utterly aloof, stood two turbaned Easterns; austere, unbending, sombre, a trifle sinister. The negroes’ vivacity and humour made them, in a way, more sympathetic, but, at the same time, threw into relief the distinction of the Orientals. They looked like kings in exile among a rabble of savages. “Mere Aryan prejudice,” you will say. Yes; but that means that it is prehistoric and inveterate.
Knight’s Key is but a temporary settlement with a wharf, a railway yard, and one or two warehouses. Thence the comfortable little steamship Miami conveyed us in about five hours to Key West, and in another seven or eight hours to Havana—from the New World to the Old.
The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of language be called “white men’s countries.”[47] In the British West Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.