Note 48 — PART II THE PROBLEM FACED

I jot down almost at random, as they occur in my notes, a few statements on the population question.

Mr. W. B. Smith, author of “The Colour-Line” (a strongly anti-negro book), makes out that the negro population has since 1860 increased by about 1,100,000 per decade. Thus, in 1860, it stood at 4,400,000, and in 1900 at 8,800,000. Meanwhile the number of negroes per thousand of the whole population has been steadily declining. In 1860 it was 141 per thousand; in 1900 only 116.

In the census of 1900, which gave the total population of the United States as 75,994,575, the coloured population was set down at 9,185,379, or 12·1 per cent.; but as the term “coloured” included 351,394 Indians and Mongolians, the actual number of negroes is reduced to 8,833,985. The coloured population of the South Atlantic and South Central States is given at 8,001,557; and as Indians and Mongolians are few in these regions, we may take it that the number of negroes was nearly eight millions. The white population of these States numbered 16,521,960, of whom only a little more than 2 per cent. were foreign-born, as against 22·5 per cent. in the North Atlantic division, and 15·8 per cent. in the North Central division. But, no doubt, the next census will show a much higher percentage of foreign-born whites in the South. See tables in “The Present South,” by E. G. Murphy.

From a carefully argued statistical paper by W. F. Willcox in Stone’s “Studies in the American Race Problem,” it appears that, taking periods of twenty years together, the percentage of increase in the negro population of the United States has steadily declined. In 1800-1820 it was 76 per cent., in 1880-1900 it was only 34 per cent. Mr. Willcox places the “maximum limit of probable negro population a century hence” at 25,000,000, and thinks that by that time the negroes will constitute only 17·8 per cent. of the population of the Southern States, instead of 32·4 per cent. as at present.