Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/602

596 people are now among us that it would be to the best interests of the country if congress, by suitable legislation, restricted immigration in such a manner as only to admit a small number and only the best elements of these heterogeneous races.

The negro, more dissimilar from the Anglo-Saxon than any other race, has purposely been omitted in this study. Though the negroes form a considerable portion of the agricultural population of a large section of the union, a mixture between the two races, as is the case in Latin America, will never take place. The Anglo-Saxon is too proud and too much bent on the preservation of his racial purity to admit of any such intermixture. He even rejects the mulatto who shows the slightest traces of black blood. The negro is physically and intellectually inferior to the white man; he is several thousand years behind the white race in his intellectual development and, as Huxley observed, will never be the equal of the white man. In the great struggle for existence which, in future centuries, will grow in intensity, the negro will be eliminated, "he will melt away before the breath of the white man as snow melts under a hot wind." This is the probable solution of the negro problem in the United States. One of the chief means by which this process of elimination is hastened, is the marked tendency of the negro to leave the rural districts and to settle in the large cities, where he has much less chance of survival than the more energetic and thrifty white man.