Page:The Negro a menace to American civilization.djvu/75



and intelligent person will doubt for a moment, I think, much less question, anything I have thus far set forth in the three last chapters of the present volume. Man's place in nature and the ethnological status of the negro are facts that have been just as completely demonstrated and settled for all time, as has been the further fact that between the years 1619 and 1862 many thousand negroes were imported into this country from the west coast of Africa ; that some few of these are probably still living at the present writing, that over three millions of their actual descendants are together with several millions more of half-castes produced chiefly by interbreeding with the white race. All this stock now inhabits various parts of the United States, though principally what is known as the "black belt," that is, an area extending through the Southern States westward, in which direction their numbers gradually decrease, as they do more markedly as we leave Philadelphia coming northward. In other words, and in brief, man is just as much an animal as is an ape, a bear, or a mouse, and he is in every way quite as much amenable to those laws controlling his evolution, development, physical well-being, metamorphoses in his morphol- 5 (65)