Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 11.djvu/587

 REVIEWS 571

should be adopted in dealing with the negro. The author finds, he believes, good grounds for concluding that the negro cannot possibly take on the substance of the white man's civilization (pp. 35, 55, 102, 127) ; that education, whether intellectual or industrial, cannot bene- fit him as a race, but will only aid in his undoing and his demoraliza- tion (pp. 159, 165, 171, 259) ; and that, since the negro is hopelessly inferior, and incapable of being lifted to even approximate equality of efficiency with the white race, he is destined through competition with the white to disappear from this continent (pp. 180-92, 215, 248). Moreover, this extinction of the negro in the United States is no far-off event, thousands of years removed, but is within appre- ciable distance. "There are those now living," our author tells us, "who will actually see the Afro- American moving rapidly toward extinction" (p. 248). In other words, within a generation or two we may expect the negro population of the United States to come to a standstill, and then rapidly to decrease in actual numbers.

It is not my purpose to point out in detail the fallacies in the argument which leads to these sweeping conclusions, but it is my duty as a reviewer to note the more obvious errors in fact and theory upon which the argument is based.

In support of his conclusion as to the early disappearance of the negro element in the population of this country, Professor Smith cites as an authority Professor Willcox, of Cornell. It is true that some of Professor Willcox' statements regarding negro vital sta- tistics would seem to lend support to our author's view, especially the one quoted at length (pp. 180-85). But it is noteworthy that Professor Willcox' most recent utterance on this subject gives little comfort to those who expect the early disappearance of the negro element in our population. In an article on " The Probable Increase of the Negro Race in the United States," in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, for August, 1905, Professor Willcox estimates the prob- able number of persons of negro descent in our population at the close of the present century at about 25,000,000 an estimate in which most experts in vital statistics would probably agree. Thus, so far as statistics are concerned, it must be said with emphasis that even the cessation of the increase in our negro population is not yet definitely in sight. The idea of the early or for that matter, of the remote elimination of the negroid element in our population is, therefore, a mere speculation.

As a matter of fact, Professor Smith's conclusions are based, not