Mr. A. H. Stone (“The American Race Problem,” p. 230) points out that “the Latin’s prejudice of colour is nowhere as strong as the Teuton’s.” In the same excellent book I find this sentence quoted from “The Foundations of Sociology,” by Professor E. A. Ross: “North America from the Behring Sea to the Rio Grande is dedicated to the highest type of civilisation; while for centuries the rest of our hemisphere will drag the ball and chain of hybridism.”
But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the European, and not always very vividly realized even by the Northern American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal observation and through the medium of books. The details of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.
In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers, distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.
It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one million in the North and West.[48]
I jot down almost at random, as they occur in my notes, a few statements on the population question.
Mr. W. B. Smith, author of “The Colour-Line” (a strongly anti-negro book), makes out that the negro population has since 1860 increased by about 1,100,000 per decade. Thus, in 1860, it stood at 4,400,000, and in 1900 at 8,800,000. Meanwhile the number of negroes per thousand of the whole population has been steadily declining. In 1860 it was 141 per thousand; in 1900 only 116.