fallacy were they to be so unwise as to bring upon themselves and us the great misfortune of another war.
The Caucasian race is not deteriorating in America. On the contrary, it is improving, as could be shown by facts and figures of the most stubborn kind, were this the proper place to introduce them. It is simply becoming acclimatized—undergoing those physiological changes which are to adapt it to the physical conditions peculiar to the American continent. Among these changes is the increased influence of the bilious element in the temperament, one of the signs of which is the darkness of the hair and eyes. This is not an indication of decay and weakness, but of increasing endurance and power. Fair hair is connected with delicacy and refinement, dark hair with strength, energy, and persistence. No one questions the relation between color and hardiness in its application to the lower animals. Dark horses are well known to have better constitutions than white or grey ones; and so far is this distinction carried that even white feet are considered objectionable.
Here, then, we probably have the grand secret after all. The true American type is melancomous. Whatever differences there may have been—and they were not slight—among the aboriginal tribes of this continent, dark hair and dark eyes were common to them all. It does not follow that we shall become red men and revert to savagism. Climate and other conditions modify individuals and nations, but racial distinctions are permanent. Any race transplanted to this continent must, by slow degrees, but inevitably, accommodate itself to its climatic conditions by such a change of temperament or constitution as shall approximate it, within the limits of its own typical forms, to the constitution and configuration of the aborigines. It is this change that is now going on among us, and one of its signs is the increasing prevalence of dark hair and dark eyes.
It may be a matter of profound regret that our climate will not sustain and preserve the beautiful blonde type, symbolical, as it is, of so much that is noble in intellect and exalted in moral worth—the type to which Christ and the Madonna are believed to have belonged—but nature is inexorable, and our regrets are vain. The dark type, however, has its excellencies, different in kind, but perhaps equal in degree, to those of the fair type. America will, no doubt, develop them to their fullest extent. The blonde may still find a home and favoring conditions among the Gothic races of Europe—in Germany, Scandinavia, and parts of England and Russia.
Several causes, at first sight apparently distinct from the leading one already noted, but, in fact, only collateral manifestations of the same principles, are rapidly accelerating the melanosis of our population.
1. In the first place, the death rate, as already incidentally mentioned, is higher in the xanthous class than in the dark-haired. In this uncongenial climate, fair-haired people are more liable than others to that most terrible scourge, consumption, as well as to other diseases affecting the respiratory and circulative functions; and it is in this class that the true scrofulous diathesis is generally exhibited.
2. While the rate of mortality is higher in the fair-haired than in the dark-haired class, the proportion of births is far greater in the latter—in other words, dark-haired women cœteris paribus, are, in our climate, more prolific than fair-haired women. Nor is this all; for while the children of dark-haired parents almost always have dark hair, the children of light-haired parents frequently
