MA.CE0 AND HIS RACE.
THE career of Math), the Cuban insurgent, the reports of whose death, whether by an accidental bullet or by a treacherous assassination, seem at last to be established, has an interest other than the political one. He was probably the greatest, certainly the most successful, mulatto or quadroon who ever lived. For eighteen months, with a force which has never exceeded twenty thousand men all told, with inadequate artillery, and supplies which were at best intermittent, he has held at bay an army of two hundred thousand Spanish soldiers, commanded by a specially picked General, and sup- ported by the resources in the way of supplies of a great European State. He inspired his followers, half-caste peasants most of them, with a zeal like that of Hofer's Bavarians, a zeal which enabled him to fight a perpetually re- treating battle without ever risking the demoralisation of his men, or any grand defeat such as might have fatally impaired their numbers. He organised a system of espionage which the Spaniards met in vain by executing every suspected spy, he manceuvred half-drilled men with a rapidity which be- wildered his scientifically trained opponents, and at the moment when he was shot, or stabbed, he had drawn the great force opposed to him over a line of fortifications con- structed by them with immense expense and labour, had got behind General Weyler, and was in full march upon the capital, where he is believed, on Spanish testimony, to have thousands of adherents. These are the feats of a great guerilla captain, and a great guerilla captain is at least an undeveloped General; but there was in Mace° something beyond military ability. He must have had impressive- ness of character of a very unusual kind. Nothing can exceed the prejudice of the true Spaniard, the man who was trained at home, against the half-caste, unless it be the prejudice of a North American or an English- man, yet there can be no doubt that Maceo was fol- lowed and reverenced by thousands of Spaniards and hundreds of Americans, and that had he lived to see the independence of his country, he would have been the first President of the Cuban Republic. Of the impression which he made upon his enemies we need no other proof than the exultant gratulations of all Spain when the news of his death was officially confirmed. City after city proclaimed a festival, and from every municipal and other corporate body in Spain there went up telegrams of congratulation to the Queen Regent. That seems to Englishmen a little base and small ; but we must remember that Spain is a thinly populated country, where the conscription is savagely enforced, and that Spaniards regarded Maceo not as they would regard a European enemy, or even a domestic rebel, but as a dark savage who dragged out their children in scores of thousands to perish of tropical heat, malaria, and the diseases which arise from a mismanaged commissariat. To overcome the prejudice of colour so completely that white Americans are mourning almost with shrieks over the fall of a quadroon, and to make so deep an impression upon a hostile European people,
Maceo must have been a great man, at least as great as, or probably greater, than Toussaint l'Ouverture, the hero of St. Domingo.
Such a career compels one to pause and inquire whether the prejudice against half-breeds, which it is only just to acknowledge that the writer himself feels in all its force, has any foundation in reasoning thought. It is quite clear, to begin with, that the popular notion that men sprung from a cross between white and dark races lack manliness and are invariably deficient in courage, rests upon no founda- tion. It was always a prejudice born of mere contempt. The half-castes of St. Domingo fought with the utmost daring, and repeatedly defeated French soldiers, though they were hampered to the last degree by the incurable distrust of the pure blacks. Hundreds of mulattoes who were enlisted in the last throes of the Civil War extorted, not only by their courage but by their discipline in battle, the admiration of American officers. General Diaz, the President of Mexico, a most daring soldier, is half an Indian. General Dodd, the hero of Dahomey, who has just been so unfairly superseded in Tonquin, whither he had been sent as Commander-in-Chief, is a Senegalese quadroon. The well-known Skinner family of Northern India, whose bravery is almost as pro- verbial there as their fidelity, were darker than many natives. The men who are defeating the Spaniards in the Philippines, rousing against them island after island, have many of them faces which in their blue-blackness seem to the inexperienced darker than most negroes, though, of course, their skins, when closely scrutinised, are of a lighter shade. The Zulus, who have a cross of Arab blood—that is, of blood which was originally no darker than that of the Jews—have proved themselves a match for British soldiers; while the half-castes of the Sondan are admitted on all hands to be among the bravest of the brave. There is, in fact, no evidence whatever that the crossed race loses in the cross any of the courage possessed by the races from which it sprung. The Eurasians of Bengal may share some of the timidity of their mothers, though we have heard that denied by both officers and mining captains who have had to test their quality ; but at all events there is no proof that in this essential element of character there is general deterioration.
It is more difficult to obtain evidence as to intellectual qualities, because the crossed race has seldom risen high ; but General Dodd, General Diaz, and Mace° showed themselves considerable administrators as well as soldiers, and many successful politicians, merchants, and litterateurs in Spanish America have been counted to the cross-breeds. The most successful novelist of France, the author of "Monte Cristo," acknowledged that he had negro blood in his veins, and so, we have been told, have two other conspicuous litteratenrs in France, whom we will not annoy by giving their names. There are families in Scotland and England known to have gipsies among their forbears, who display remarkable mental ability, while a whole group of barristers may be named in India and the West Indies who are not of the pure blood; and we have ourselves talked with a mulatto from the last-named region who was nearly as dark as any negro, and who seemed to us a statesman. We could, were it not so invidious, name one or two prominent figures in London who are unquestionably quadroons, and, in short, we do not believe, after an unusual study of the facts, that the crossed race is inherently deficient in intellectual power. There is, no doubt, a considerable dif- ference in the kind of that power. The intellect of a quadroon or octoroon, whether the dark blood be negro or Indian or gipsy, seems to move quicker than that of an Englishman, but to move in jumps rather than by any steady progression, and in most cases—we have met but one unmistakable excep- tion—to be more wanting in depth, or, to avoid so vague an expression, to be less capable of discerning the reality of things. The imagination thwarts the brain instead of helping it. But difference does not always constitute inferiority, and it would not surprise us in the least to hear of a great half- breed reasoner any more than it does surprise us to hear of a half-breed orator, or painter, or poet. Something has occurred to the brain in consequence of the cross, but the evidence as yet does not show that it is radical deterioration. IBut the morale of half-breeds? On that point the evidence, so far as there is any or can be any till they have come more to the front, is not so favourable ; but even on this point prejudice—or, if you will, preconceived opinion—somewhat perverts judgment. We expect the half-caste to be morally the same as the European, which, so long as we acknowledge substantial differences in the morale of races, is utterly unreasonable. He is one of a new race, and we never enter- tain the expectation that any other separate race shall be exactly English. Why should a quadroon be the same as a European any more than an Arab, or a Red Indian, or a native of Paraguay ? It is enough that he can be a good man, to take any stigma from him, and that he can be one let the missionaries of the whole world give evidence from experience. So far from being irreligious in an active sense, the tendency of the half-breed in all countries is towards superstition, -rising sometimes into a wonderfully determined form of piety not infrequently capable of enduring martyrdom. We doubt, we also confess, the alleged tendency to treachery, except so far as it is the tendency everywhere of men between whose position in their own eyes and in the eyes of their fellow-men there is some enormous disparity for which they personally are not responsible. Deformed Europeans frequently display a certain treacherous spitefulness, the result of the bitterness engendered by perpetual pity or contempt. Even as regards sexual morality the crossed race is on a level at least with Neapolitans or Roumanians; and then consider who they are, nine-tenths of them the descendants of mothers or grand- mothers of a very low type, and the remainder with Pagan, or it may be savage, blood fresh in their veins, bred up in the tropics, and surrounded from childhood by influences from which Indian officers and West Indian planters make every effort to preserve their children. If there is anything in heredity, or anything in education, both those potent forces are against them from the very beginning. Numbers of them, of course, are bad; but to suppose that there are not even among them an almost infinite number of degrees of badness, ranging from criminality up to useful virtue, is utterly absurd. The bad or weak qualities we should predicate of all of them are a latent vanity as strong as that of Southern Frenchmen, indolence rising in middle age almost to a passion, .and in all directions a lack, after a certain amount of provoca- tion, of reasonable self-control. That is a point at which every man with dark blood in his veins is liable to allow his .reason to cease to rule him, and to act like a gambler when the fever has overcome his brains. He acts for a time as if he were "possessed." That is the specialty of the race ; but then it is the specialty of every race, only the exploding point, or point where the reason fails to govern, lies in the European a good deal farther off.
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