explained, why white men will allow themselves to cohabit freely with
black women to whom they feel naturally attracted but will "see red" and
commit murder as soon as they find a black man attempting to gain the
favour of a woman of their own colour. "Un adolescent aime toutes les
femmes" say the French, and it is generally accepted that man is by
nature more inclined to polygamy than woman is towards polyandry, still
man and woman are both swayed and motived by the same elemental jealousy
that is born of fear of losing something valued; the emotion which
Descartes has so well defined as "une espèce de crainte qui se rapport
au désir qu'on a de se conserver la possession de quelque bien."

It is, no doubt, true that the thinking white woman, no less than the
thinking white man, is led to feel dismay and even resentment against
the Natives by apprehension of the possibility of danger to white
civilisation through fusion of white and black, but this is a feeling
caused by intelligent appreciation rather than by instinctive
apprehension, and as such liable to be dispelled by argument tending to
show that no real danger threatens. During a recent agitation against
miscegenation in Rhodesia a number of letters written by white women
appeared in the press from which it was easy to gather that the chief
concern of the writers was not the possible degradation of the whites,
though this was not overlooked, but rather the simple fact that some
white men were cohabiting with black women to the prejudice of the
matrimonial chances of eligible women of their own race.

But it is unwise to dogmatise in the realms of social and racial
psychology; we have not yet discovered the means for analysing with
precision the subtle elements of the human soul. I have used the word
instinct here in the sense given to it by William James, who defines it
as "the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends