African blood, no doubt, seems an evil to be prevented at any cost, but
those who, like myself, have seen coloured women working in their homes
as thriftily and self-sacrificingly as the best of our own women, and
coloured men labouring steadily against heavy odds to improve their
condition, have become convinced that the coloured people of South
Africa suffer under no inherent disabilities when compared with the
whites, and for this reason we cannot join in the general wail over a
predicted evil which we regard as exaggerated in itself and not,
moreover, likely to happen. I would not, however, be taken to advocate
the inter-breeding of white and black. Those who have witnessed the
misery and suffering which the coloured people have to endure for being
coloured will welcome any fair means of preventing miscegenation in
South Africa. Proscriptive legislation has been advocated by both the
detractors and the defenders of the half-breed, as a means of
preventing what both schools, for their different reasons, regard as
wrong and undesirable, but I cannot agree that it can ever be right or
expedient to penalise and make criminal a natural act which under
existing conditions is in many places unavoidable.

There can be no doubt that the evil of miscegenation in South Africa has
been greatly exaggerated, both in respect of its nature and its extent,
but, nevertheless, so long as the racial prejudice of the white man
remains as strong as it is to-day--and there is nothing to show that it
is likely to decrease in the future--so long will it be the duty of all
good citizens to discourage by persuasion and precept the production of
children for whom the ruling race has no love and little pity. Even
those among the whites who, in a spirit of good will and tolerance urge
that the coloured people should receive preferential treatment because
of the white blood which is in them, cannot escape having their point of
view warped by their racial prepossession, for, surely, it is not