Abolitionists contended that the 'black brother' was
indeed a blood brother, and entitled to the 'Rights of Man'; their
opponents replied that the negro, being (as they held) of another
species, might justly be treated in all respects as one of white man's
domestic animals, and be his property as well as his drudge. At the turn
of the century, the adherence of Cuvier gave prestige to Polygenesis on
its scientific side: and it took all the reasonableness of Prichard in
the next generation to turn the tide even in England. But the issue of
the American Civil War, to which reference has already been made,
coincided so closely in time with the work of Darwin and Lyell on the
real meaning of species and on the antiquity of man, that the
controversy was closed without bitterness. The new phase of Polygenism
which seems now to be opening, with successive discoveries of the
quaternary stratification of races, and Keith's analysis of the family
tree of the _Hominidae_, starts from wholly different data,
unembarrassed by fears or hopes of a 'Neanderthal' origin for the Negro,
or for any living or recent _Homo_.
The 'human family' then seems re-established as something more than a
platform phrase; and separatists (who are always with us) have had to
fall back upon another criterion of disunity.
THE UNITY OF MANKIND AS A RATIONAL ANIMAL
Omitting language for a moment (which since first telling of the 'Tower
of Babel' story has somewhat fallen from grace as a symptom of unity
among mankind), or rather, subsuming it as one of the most essential
exhibitions of rationality, and indeed its chief instrument, we come to
Man's unity as a creature possessed of reason, and expressing this
reasoning habit in specific modes of living, under whatever external
surroundings.
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