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 The Race Problem in the South, 25

time. No rabbits had lived in Australia until the English recently imported them, and no negroes lived in America until the slave- traders brought them here before the Revolutionary war, and on down until the abolition of the slave trade in the year 1808. From the first colonization of this country on down to the date of the abo- lition of the slave trade, only about 300,000 negroes were imported, and none have been brought to our shores since. They increase in a geometrical ratio. The mind does not readily conceive how this ratio, with such small beginnings, could so soon reach such large re- sults. A single dollar loaned for twenty years on the stipulation that at the end of each year the sum was to be doubled, and so on, would require a payment of over a million of dollars for the last payment. Population, in obedience to this law, attains vast proportions within a single century.

A PROLIFIC PEOPLE.

The condition of slavery was not so favorable to the rapid propa- gation of the negro race as the condition of freedom has proven to be. There are those who believe that the negro in a state of freedom and self-dependence would share the fate of the Irtdian. Like the Indian, it was thought that he would gradually disappear from the face of the country as the whites multiplied. The reverse has proven to be the case, and the grave question confronts us : Will the white man disappear from the face of the country as the negro multiplies ? In the month of August in 1619, a Dutch man-of-war sailed up the James river to the plantations, and sold twenty Africans at auction to the wealthier planters. They were made slaves for life, and thus the institution of slavery took its start in this country, although slavery was not established in the colonies until about a half a century after- ward.

The total number of negroes in the United States in the year 1790 was 697,000. The census of one century later, which will be taken next year, in 1890, will show a negro population in this country of about ten millions. There were 6,580,000 in 1880. Under the more favorable conditions of freedom the negro population doubles itself about every twenty years. Under the impulse of a heavy foreign immigration the white race only doubles itself in this country about every thirty- five years. When we consider the increased ratio of propagation among the negroes over the whites, the results are posi- tively startling. The dollar which was doubled each year for twenty years increased to over a million dollars. The twenty negroes whom the Dutch landed on the James river have increased now to about