Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/453

Rh number of years than in one more delicately reared. Again, in estimating fecundity, the pain and danger attendant upon parturition are factors, and its comparative ease to the laboring woman, contrasted with the profound and long-continued prostration it brings to the lady of tender palms and jeweled fingers, is well known.

Again, the African on climatic grounds finds in the Southern country a more congenial home. In many districts there, and these by far the most fertile, the white man is unable to take the field and have health. It is otherwise with the African, who, the child of the sun, gathers strength and multiplies in these low, hot, feverish regions.

The wide advantage, therefore, in the rate of increase on the side of the African finds its solution in a superior natural fecundity, exerting itself under these favoring conditions.

Now mark the following: The white population, increasing at the rate of twenty per cent in ten years, or two per cent per annum, doubles itself every thirty-five years. The black, increasing at the rate of thirty-five per cent in ten years, or three and a half per cent per annum, doubles itself in twenty years. Hence we find:

Our interest is in the progress of population in the Southern States, where the blacks almost altogether now are, and where they will continued to be massed more and more; and above stand the significant figures. These will be modified more or less by disturbing causes, the most prominent being immigration. But even should immigration ever take a pronounced Southern direction, yet immigration must slacken, and before many years practically cease, while the black growth must be perpetually augmenting, perpetually advancing its volume; and, every allowance being made, it is morally certain that, in seventy or eighty years (as things now go) the blacks in every Southern State will overwhelmingly preponderate.