Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/163

Rh as the inferior race increases in numbers and advances in education will lead to inevitable conflict between the two races. As the negro becomes numerically the stronger, and, through education, appreciates more fully his present position, he will commence a struggle for the mastery, and then the days of the Ku-klux will be eclipsed in blood and slaughter. Such is the condition to which these ill-fated States are hurrying. To ward off this impending evil, Judge Tourgee urges upon the General Government the work of educating the blacks. Such, in brief, is the “Appeal to Cæsar.”

Education seems to be regarded as a universal panacea for all the ills of the people, but in this case, according to the author's own statement of the situation, the education of the negroes would but precipitate the impending conflict. Our only safety would seem to be in leaving them in ignorance.

The whole “Appeal” is based upon the theory that the negroes are migrating southward from the border States into those of the South Atlantic and the Gulf in great numbers. This theory the author attempts to establish by deductions from census statistics.

It may, in passing, be suggested that a careful revision of his figures will show many important arithmetical errors, which may modify very sensibly some of his conclusions. It is unnecessary to follow his methods of reasoning, as the truth regarding the questions at issue can be arrived at much more directly. The fact is, that the negro is not migrating southward. There is no massing of the colored people in the cotton States. In 1860 the colored element of these States formed 66 per cent of the colored element of the country. In 1880 it formed precisely the same proportion. Between 1860 and 1880 the colored element of the country increased 48 per cent. The same element of the cotton States increased, in this interval, in precisely the same proportion, neither more nor less. These figures are conclusive upon this point, and from them there is no appeal.

But the fact remains that, in these cotton States, the colored element was in 1880, in comparison with the white element, slightly stronger than it was twenty years before. This, however, is due not to a southward movement of the colored people, but to a decrease in the rate of increase of the whites of those States. While the increase of the native white population in the country at large between 1860 and 1880 was sixty-one per cent, that part of the same element resident in the cotton States increased but thirty-nine per cent. This low rate of increase among the whites might seem to establish Judge Tourgee's position, though not in the way he states it, were it not for the fact that three fourths of this increase took place during the decade between 1870 and 1880. The increase of whites in the South received a most effectual check during the four years of war, in which every male capable of bearing arms was in the field, and in which fully half a million laid down their lives. Since the war the white