Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, “The Negro Not a Beast”
“While it is true that the white race exhibits some qualities of superiority over any other, we are to remember that there are wide differences in the same Caucasian (Semitic and Aryan) family; and also we should remember that some of the qualities which have given this branch of the human family its preeminence in the world are not such as can be pointed to as in all respects admirable. … The secret of the greater intelligence and aptitude of the Caucasian undoubtedly in great measure is to be attributed to the commingling of blood amongst its various branches; and this was evidently forced in large measure by circumstances under divine control.”
The passage stands in a section headed "How Shall We Account for Racial Differences?" which explains skin colour by climate, soil and "the strong pre-natal influence of the mother’s mind". The sentence immediately before it says that "Africa is inhabited by various tribes or nations of negroes—some more and some less degraded than the average". The same paragraph says the qualities that gave Europeans their pre-eminence are not admirable, suggests the gospel might have found better soil in India, and describes the elect church as taken "from amongst the most quarrelsome, aggressive, selfish and dominating of humanity". The section closes: "It remains to be proven that the similar commingling of the various tribes of Chinese for several centuries would not equally brighten their intellects; and the same with the peoples of India and Africa."
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Provenance and verification note for Zion's Watch Tower and Herald of Christ's Presence, The Negro Not a Beast
Confidence note. Read in the 1902 Reprints volume on the Internet Archive on 19 September 2026 and read again, leaf by leaf from the item’s djvu.xml, on the same date. The running head on this Reprints page reads "July 15, 1902 ZION’S WATCH TOWER (215-216)" and the page closes with the marker [3043], which confirms the page range commonly cited for this passage. An earlier version of this record ended the quotation at "… amongst its various branches." with a full stop; in the scan that sentence runs on past a semicolon, and the rest of it is now quoted. OCR damage repaired against the surrounding text; the page images were not separately inspected.
Scan provenance. Internet Archive item “Magazines: Zion’s watch tower and herald of Christ’s presence, 1902”, the Watch Tower Reprints volume for 1902.
Corroborated by. src-race-zwt-1902-0715-negro-not-beast-refutation
Notes. Critical sites usually quote this passage as far as "in all respects admirable". The qualifications that follow stand in the same paragraph of the scan.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-race-zwt-1902-0715-white-race-superiority