the ultimate choice . Arnold Toynbee . to dwell together in unity has not been coming easy to the human race . we may agree that this is good and pleasant for brethren , but few human communities , so far , have been prepared to take all other human beings to their bosoms as their brothers . they have usually found some excuse for treating the majority of their fellow-men as lesser breeds without the law . if one stigma wears off , we invent another . when our neighbour ceases to be an infidel , we still stigmatise him as a foreigner , and , if he ceases to be a foreigner , we still ostracise him as a negro or an albino . this widespread passion for being a chosen people evidently has deep psychological roots . we human beings have gone on indulging in it at the price of bringing endless disasters on ourselves . we have gone on till we have now been overtaken by the atomic age . in this age the price of disunity is evidently going to be prohibitive . this has been recognized quickly and widely , so today we have a stronger motive than we have ever had before for trying to get rid of our self-inflicted divisions . our choice now lies between co-existence and non-existence . the removal of the main present hindrances to co-existence has therefore become the most urgent item on mankind &apos;s agenda . three outstanding present hindrances are ideologies , nationalism , and race-feeling . we have to get rid of them all , and we have not left ourselves much time for that . this raises a practical question of priorities . which of these three evils is going to be the most difficult to eradicate ? whichever it is , we ought to concentrate our efforts on combating this one first . one answer to this question about priorities was implied in the foundation of the Institute of race relations . this answer was made explicit in a paper addressed to Chatham House in 1950 by one of the moving spirits in the launching of the Institute , Mr Harry Hodson . there are two problems in world politics today which transcend all others , Mr Hodson said in this context . they are the struggle between communism and liberal democracy and the problem of race relations . of the two , I am prepared to argue that the problem of race relations is the more important , since , for one thing , it would remain with us in its full complexity even if communism were to settle down to peaceful neighbourliness with democracy in a world partitioned between them . Mr Hodson is surely right in holding that ideological differences can be overcome more easily than racial differences can . an ideology can be put into cold storage . the more awkward and obnoxious of its tenets can be reduced to dead letters . more than that , there is the possibility of conversion from one ideology to another . in the past , this process of conversion has sometimes gone with a run . racial differences , too , can be overcome by conversion , but the process in this field is a physical , not an intellectual , one . the other name for it is intermarriage . happily for mankind &apos;s prospects , intermarriage between geographically intermingled populations of different physique has been normal hitherto , whereas racial segregation has been exceptional . in our present-day world , the normal way of overcoming race-differences is exemplified in two large and important constituents of the human race : the Muslim community and the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking Roman catholic community . in Mexico and Brazil today , most people have at least three different racial strains in their physique : the European , the pre-Columbian American , and the African ; but domestic injustices and dissensions in these and other Latin American countries do not , on the whole , run on racial lines . Latin Americans are not race-conscious , and Muslims are not either . visit , for instance , the American University of Beirut and watch the students on the campus there . you will observe a great variety of race , but no tendency towards antipathy or segregation on account of this . in fact , race-feeling seems to be an exceptional failing . in the present-day world it is virtually confined to three minorities : the Teutonic-speaking peoples , the high-caste Hindus , and the Jews . in the atomic age the prejudice for which these three minorities stand has no future . the wave of the future - supposing that the human race is going to allow itself a future - is the comparative freedom from race-prejudice that is exhibited by the Latin Americans and the Muslims . the third of mankind &apos;s present three apples of discord is one that is not mentioned by Mr Hodson in the passage that I have quoted from a paper of his . it is nationalism ; and perhaps the only good thing that nationalism has to be said for it is that , as some offset to the havoc that it works , it does at least cut across the alternative division of mankind into conflicting races . nationalism in its present-day form originated among the west European peoples . unhappily it has now infected most of the rest of the world , but it is still rampant in its birth-place , and this has had at least one fortunate result . it has saved the majority of the human race from falling under the lasting domination of the minority that has an unusually small amount of pigment in its skin . if this bleached minority had chosen to gang up together , it might have been able to dominate the majority for quite a long time , on the strength of the temporary lead that it has gained in technological progress . but the bleached race has halved or quartered its potential strength by expending this on domestic national rivalries , and this makes it unlikely that the present division of the world between two ideological camps will ever be matched by a world-wide racial division between the bleached and the tanned . try to imagine a race-war between Russia and America lined up together on one side and India and Pakistan lined up together on the other . this imaginary alignment of forces seems most unlikely ever to become actual . it is true that one can imagine Russia and America getting together against China . they did get together against Japan during the second world war , and China is likely to become more formidable than Japan ever has been or ever could be . if China were to acquire the bomb , it seems safe to prophesy that Russia and America would become allies again within the next five years . in that situation , a series of half-a-dozen leading articles in the press of either country could effectively change the climate of their ideological relations with each other . but , if this did happen , it would be just another instance of the familiar working of the age-old balance of power . the coincidence of a power-politics line-up with a race-difference would be accidental . and , as a matter of fact , the two opposing alliances would not pan out neatly on racial lines . Russia &apos;s present east European satellites would be in China &apos;s camp , while the south-east Asian peoples would be in Russia &apos;s and America &apos;s . it looks , then , as if the evil of racialism can be localised , thanks to the counteracting effects of the evil of nationalism . probably we need not fear that there will be a world-war waged on racial lines . yet , even if we succeed in localising the evil of race-feeling , it will still be so much tinder ready to flare into flame at the touch of the first spark . and , besides being dangerous , race-feeling is odious in itself . it is therefore not enough just to localise it . we have also to try to eradicate it wherever we find it . this will be easier in some continents than in others . the segregation of Jews from gentiles will , it may be hoped , be broken down rather rapidly by intermarriage all over the world except , perhaps , in Israel . we may look forward to seeing the Jewish diaspora transform itself from a closed racial community into an open religious community . if this were to happen , Judaism would at last have achieved its manifest destiny of becoming one of the world-wide religions . again , we may hope to see the end of the segregation of citizens of different colours in the United States and of citizens of different castes in India . in both India and the United States the segregationists seem now to be fighting a losing battle . the harder of the two battles is , of course , the one in India , since here the institution of caste has the momentum of three thousand years of history behind it . but in India , as in the United States , it looks now as if the victory of integration were in sight . if and when racialism has been overcome in these two sub-continents , it will have been more or less confined to Palestine and to those parts of Africa where , as in Palestine , there is an immigrant minority from Europe . here we touch the hard core of the race problem . racial minorities that have been dominant have to reconcile themselves to accepting equality with the majority of their fellow-citizens . and emancipated racial majorities that have recently been denied their human rights have to reconcile themselves , on their side , to accepting equality with their former overlords without abusing the power of numbers under a democratic r&amp;eacute;gime . these requirements call for almost superhuman self-restraint and magnanimity on both sides , and that will be hard to achieve if the physical segregation of the two races continues . the position of being a precariously dominant minority seems to be almost too difficult for human nature to cope with . this is illustrated by the present temper of the French colons in Algeria . in north America the French have had a better record than the English and the Dutch in their dealings with the pre-Columbian natives of the continent . yet in Africa today they are behaving no better than their English and Dutch opposite numbers . if the situation in Africa is to be saved , the geographically intermingled races there will have to follow the example of Latin America and the Islamic world . in those two regions , intermarriage has brought with it a happy solution of racial problems . bella gerant alii , tu , felix Austria , nube . this famous line can be made to point a moral for the present-day European colonist in Africa by making a small change of words at the end . tu felix nube colone . for the European colonist in Africa , intermarriage offers a happy way out , and perhaps the only happy way that can be found for him . if he replies that he can not bear the prospect , it can be answered that he is being asked to do no more than has been done already , long ago , by his fellow-European colonist in Latin America . he can also be asked to face the alternative . intermarry or get out is probably the ultimate choice that destiny is offering to the European minorities in Africa in our day . comment on Corfield . F B Welbourn . we have no proof it was Sammy , Robin pointed out . we have no proof of anything . in fact truth itself seems to be an exotic . - Elspeth Huxley , the flame trees of Thika . 1 : impartiality . Mr Corfield has a distinguished record in the Sudan political service ; and from September 1954 until 1956 he was a member of the secretariat of the war council of the council of Ministers in Kenya - the body which , more than any other , was concerned with direction of the offensive against Mau Mau . it is as well to ask from the start whether , in a situation which aroused - and still arouses - such high emotions on both sides , it was wise to appoint , for the purposes of an historical survey , one who was so intimately involved in the opposite camp . he criticises government and Europeans in general ; but he manages to imply that , if they made mistakes , Kenyatta and his associates were deliberately bad . at certain points his documentary sources are demonstrably wrong , not only in detail but in interpretation , and the reader who spots these faults is bound to ask how many others he has not spotted . 