equipment, be inferior to the white man in his natural adaptiveness to a
complex civilization existing under very different climatic conditions
from those in which he was evolved. This does not mean, however, that
the negro is in any sense a degenerate. On the contrary, from the point
of view of a tropical environment, as we have already made plain, the
negro may be regarded as the white man's superior. It is only in
countries out of his own natural environment, under strange conditions
of life to which he has not yet become biologically adapted, that the
negro is inferior to the white man. In Africa he is the white man's
superior if we adopt survival as the test of superiority.

Influence of Slavery on the Negro.--There is no longer any doubt that
the influence of slavery on the negro, as a form of industry, was both
beneficent and maleficent. The negroes brought to America by the slave
traders were subject to a very severe artificial selection, which,
perhaps, secured a better type of negro physically on the whole, and a
more docile type mentally; but the chief beneficent influence of slavery
on the negro was that it taught him to work, to some extent at least.
Moreover, it gave the negro the Anglo-Saxon tongue and the rudiments of
our morality, religion, and civilization.

On the other hand, slavery did not fit the individual or the race for a
life of freedom, and did not raise moral standards much above those of
Africa. The monogamic form of the family was, to be sure, enforced upon
the slaves, but the family life was often broken up; for even when the
owner of the slaves was kind-hearted and humane, on his death his
property would be sold and the families of his slaves scattered. Under
such conditions it is not surprising that the negro learned little of
family morality. Again, being property himself, the negro could not be
taught properly to appreciate the rights of property. Finally slavery