terested in the negro problem, but were confining their research to local conditions.

The chagrin of the writer was considerable, for the denials of aid were usually accompanied with an expressed appreciation of the practical value of the proposed research. Having exhausted the possibilities for securing funds, he resolved to rely upon his own resources in financing the undertaking.

With this in view, he left Chicago in the fall of 1909, and soon thereafter was en route to Cape Town, Africa, traveling as a steerage passenger. In South Africa, employment was obtained in the gold and diamond mines where hundreds of thousands of negroes are gathered as laborers under white superintendents.

Leaving South Africa, he journeyed overland to Cairo, a distance of 4,500 miles. From Egypt, a journey down the East Coast enabled him to see several coloniesFrench, Italian, British, Portuguese.

From Africa the investigation was extended to Australasia: the year following, to the East Indies, South and East Asia. Later, South and Central America and the West Indies were visited.

In Africa, the course of the journey included the full length of the Nile. In Equatorial South America, the headwaters of the Amazon were reached in the high Andes, and that river followed to the Atlantic Ocean.

During the six years of travel, the mines of Africa and Peru, the newspapers, magazines, and lecture platform of South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and the United States yielded the funds that had been so earnestly sought at American institutions. Working two

and a half years underground (from 700 to 1,900 feet) may not appeal to one as an enticing way of financing a scientific undertaking, but such a method has two important advantages—the rate of remuneration is relatively high, and one is thrown into intimate and prolonged contact with many colored races. The intimacy of contact is an important consideration to the ethnological student.

Both in foreign lands and in America the extensive study of the contact of races, together with the prolonged journeys, have appealed to the press, and some twenty important publications have given lengthy articles to the result of the investigations. The interest thus manifested more than compensates for the hardships of the undertaking, for it is a tribute to the need and possible value of the research. The work was completed just as the United States were drawn into the World War, thereby creating a condition which rendered its publication neither practical nor expedient at that time. Since the conclusion of hostilities attention has been forced upon the American negro problem by violent symptoms of unrest of that race, while in the final revision the author has been able to make use of additional information, obtained when in service in the American Expeditionary Force, by a first-hand study of colored contingents in Europe-Asiatic, African, and American— thus completing a study of the color problem upon all continents.

While this volume deals primarily with the negro problem it will readily be seen that this, though the gravest, is not the only color problem to be solved before the realization of a "White America." The danger from beyond the Pacific, rightly called the "Yellow Peril," must be faced

courageously. Upon its proper solution depends the attainment of the white ideal as much as upon the segregation of the African race which has been with us for three centuries, has grown to some eleven millions in our midst, and is wholly alien to our race and institutions. In a much minor number we have the red Indians, the absorption of whom will in a measure lower the creative intelligence of the white man.

All members of the white race do not have equal value in establishing and perpetuating civilization, and the coming to this country of millions from southern and southeastern Europe constitutes an additional problem.

The program proposed for the solution of the negro problem should be adjusted to a program for the exclusion of the Asiatic and to one for the selection of a desirable type of European immigrant.

During the period of preparation of this volume there appeared two publications of importance, one dealing with the racial basis of European history (The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant), the other showing the impending peril of the Asiatic to Europe as well as to America and the rest of the white world (The Rising Tide of Color, by Lothrop Stoddard). The reader is referred to these publications for data bearing upon our immigration problem and the world-wide color problem.

It is impossible to deal with a wide range of history without presenting details of data to which exception may be taken. Particularly this is true when use is made of any of the present classifications of the races of mankind, for the current classifications are not without defect.

The opinions of others have been sought even when the

research of the writer may have placed him in more favorable position for the acquirement of the data presented than the authority cited. Nor has there been an attempt to limit quotations to the best known authorities, for the truths herein presented have been discerned by many students. In presenting data from some of the earlier writers, who worked with less complete information than that available to the ethnologists of today, care has been taken to utilize such of their data as is found in accord with present information.

I wish to acknowledge indebtedness to Mr. Madison Grant for his criticism of the ethnological data herein presented. The reader will find his views definitely expressed in a quotation given at the beginning of Chapter XIII.

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

"There is no lamp by which my feet may be guided but the lamp of experience." This declaration is found in that eventful oration of Patrick Henry which brought the Southern colonies to the aid of the Northern and resulted in the establishing of the United States of America. It is a tribute to the inestimable value of experience as a guide to conduct, individual and social. Experience is knowledge, and, by having knowledge of the past, we are able to avoid the mistakes of the past. Experience charts the oceans, determines dangerous currents, places beacons upon the rocks, marks the safe passages.

A well known British statesman, when contemplating the perilous position of sixty million British whites who rule nearly four hundred million colored subjects, said that the problems arising from the white man's contact with the colored races were the most difficult confronting civilization, problems upon which history casts no light. There is an element of gloom in this observation. Practical statesmen seek light from the past by which to proceed in the present and in the future. If civilization's chief problem is not to be made clearer by light from history, there is reason for doubt and gloom. Were the problems arising from the con