Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 27.djvu/164

150 race has taken up a rate of increase equal to, if not greater than, that of the country at large, a greater rate than that of the colored people within its borders, and there is no apparent reason why they should not maintain it. It is not, then, a migration of the negroes southward which has caused their relative gain in these States, but it is the losses of the white race—losses which, however, are rapidly being repaired.

As the negroes are not increasing as rapidly as the whites, either in the country at large or in the cotton States, and therefore are destined to become constantly of less numerical importance, the pressing necessity for doing something to ward off the evils predicted by the authors above quoted does not appear to exist.



E are beginning to hear lamentations over the realism of our time. Not only are the gods dead, God is dead. Art finds no place for Imagination, save in setting her to devise ways and means for a more complete photographic process. Among the crimes laid to the account of Science, this is not the least; indeed, perhaps this may sum them all, that she has taken away our Lord and will show us nothing in return but the geologic formation of a sepulchre. While this charge is unjust, radically unjust, it must be allowed that the manner of commendation employed by many advocates of science is responsible, in large measure, for our bread-and-butter attitude. The fault lies in the original constitution of certain men—not that they are scientists, but that they are small scientists; men for whom a formula, or a compound, or a root, or a fact whatsoever, is the end. To know the most names of the most classifications is to be saved, to apply chemistry in the manufacture of salable beer is to make "calling and election" sure. The devotion of these little men to science is not only at the expense of all that is highest, but is, as was intimated, largely responsible for the realism over which so many weep. Men of science, that is to say men of science, are not accountable for deadness of soul. The wonder with which those early Greeks looked out upon the face of all things may not for one instant be compared with the wonder that fills the soul to-day before this stupendous universe:

 Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen: Dein Sinn ist zu, dein Herz ist todt."

Because we have learned that color is not in sunset or rose, is there therefore no color? Is the marvel anywise diminished by knowing