Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/692

674 "As a rule, the influences which have accelerated a nation's progress and brought it to the apogee of its social existence end in precipitating its ruin by their further action. Every direction which humanity takes has almost always something of evil in it—is limited in its very nature, and can not stand its extreme consequences. All earthly existence bears in itself, from the first, the germs of its decay." It would not be difficult to point to the springs of human action which must render this necessary, except on the presumption of a revolution in human nature itself, an event not likely to occur.

It is not always the highest that prevail, especially in the conflicts of industry. It is the plodding, the hardy—those who have few wants and can do with little. This is well understood by the industrial classes who have come into conflict with the Chinese in this country and in Australia. And it is plain that a hardy race with moderate wants, which increases twice as fast as a higher race in the same territory, will contribute more and more to the psychological and social status of the whole people. There is nothing surer than that the high-toned Yankee is losing in his relative weight of numbers in this country, and it is equally sure that he will lose more and more, and eventually be absorbed. The German, the Celt, the Southerner, the colored, are all gaining upon him. Some patriotic people deplore the incoming and rapid multiplication of white foreigners in the North; and yet it is this very accession of Caucasian strength that affords the best ground of hope for the psychological elevation of the great American type or types which are yet to take definite form. If only Yankees were contending with the colored for supremacy, it would go far worse with the whites than it now does in the race of numbers. Allowing the increase of the colored to be 33 per cent, in ten years, they would double four times in less than a century; that is, the census of 1980 would show their numbers to have increased from 6,577,000 to 117,000,000! Taking the increase of the Northern whites to be 15·7, as it is shown to be for the last decade, after eliminating the obvious augmentation due to immigration, their numbers would only double while the colored quadrupled; and the census of 1980 would show that the native whites of the North had increased from 24,403,000 to 105,000,000. That is, the colored race of the United States would then outnumber the descendants of the present native Northern whites by 12,000,000. It is, of course, not to be expected that these ratios of increase would be maintained for that period; both would fall, and both fall, perhaps, in about the same proportion; and this will probably take place, notwithstanding the accession of white mothers to the colored stock and the infusion of foreign blood into the veins of native whites. If these and the colored were the only contestants on American soil, the despised race would make comparatively short work of it, and come to be the prevailing people. As it is, however, with rapid increase of whites at the South, and white immigrants pouring into the country,