“That is strange,” said I, “for in my day the negroes were very numerous in the southern states—a majority in some places—and the question how they were to be disposed of constituted one of the questions of state of that period.”
“True,” he replied, “but up to that time there had been no very severe competition for the means of living. But it became more and more difficult from that time on to make a living, and wherever there is strong competition between men, the strong positive, vigorous and hard, are sure to crowd the softer and weaker out, and take the prize they are struggling for. In your day the negroes were generally content, in fact were compelled to be content, with such humble employments as the whites did not care to engage in because there was enough of a more ambitious sort to employ them. But when the whites found it necessary to compete with the negroes for the work they had before monopolized, they easily beat them. The defeat of men in the struggle for life affects them in two ways; it discourages, worries and exhausts them mentally; and it destroys their vigor through want and starvation, physically. The latter of these effects tells at once in shortening the existence of the present generation, and both of them tell on the general force and vigor, the deterioration of which is seen in the reduced numbers and virility of the succeeding generations. Wild animals newly domesticated, fail to breed through mental strain and worry. The same is true of savages when the mental burdens of civilization are too suddenly laid upon them, and the same principle holds in civil life when from any cause the burden of life becomes too heavy—as, to the poor man when he struggles against odds for bread for his family, and to the rich when he struggles doubtfully for the superfluities required by fashion. The negro race is not extinct by any means even in the United States, but its extinction is only a question of comparatively short time easily estimated from the advance in that direction already made.”
“But it seems to me,” said I, “that there can no longer be such a desperate struggle for existence since the means of livelihood are within the reach of all, and the exertion required has been so much lessened by the state’s care of the young etc.”