Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/461

 RACE AND MARRIAGE 447

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decline of white population, and a corresponding growth in the proportion of colored. The movement of population in the four leading colonies has been as follows :

WHITES

Bermudas ; i79i, 52.60 per cent.

1891, 37.90 per cent.

Barbadoes 1786, 20.40 per cent.

1891, 8.60 per cent.

Trinidad 1861, 55.60 per cent.

1891, 43.50 per cent.

Jamaica -.1673, 43.80 per cent.

1 891, 2.30 per cent.

In the Spanish West Indies there has been an equally notable increase in the proportion of whites :^*

WHITES

Cuba 1774, 56.20 per cent.

1877, 66.70 per cent.

1907, 70. per cent.

Porto Rico 1802, 47.90 per cent.

1890, 62.80 per cent.

The gospel of race amalgamation which was preached with passionate earnestness in the north during and after the Civil War was in the main an exaggerated outcome of the humani- tarian social philosophy which underlay the abolition movement, but it had a quasi-scientific basis in the belief in physical ad- vantages to be gained by race crossing. Wendell Phillips and the authors of the "Miscegenation" collection held that, since intermixture of nearly homogeneous types in numerous historical instances had proved beneficial, intermixture must again prove so with races so far apart as the whites and negroes. It was con- tended that an infusion of the blood of a tropical race would augment the versatility and vitality of the whites. ''^ Such views,

"Hoffman, American Statistical Association, IV, 182, 184; see also Censo de la R'epubliza de Cuba, 1907, 314, 315. It is probable that part of the increase of whites may be accounted for by the fact that many persons of slightly mixed blood are now recorded as white.

■^ Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, 190, 191. Hoffman has collected some of the most radical utterances of the extreme miscegenationists.