Is the Negro on the Way to a higher Civilisation?

Auckland Star, Volume XIX, Issue 100, 28 April 1888, Page 3 (Supplement)

Is the Negro on the Way to a higher Civilisation?

Tins future of tho negroes in our Southern States its a question to which Mr Fronde's recent book on the condition of the blacks in the West Indies imparts a peculiar interest. What te to become, or what lias become of the 700,000 nejrrcos in the British West Indies is ft matter of small concern in comparison with what is bo become of the 6.000,000 negroes in the Southern section of the United Slates—for the future of the blacks in that quarter neces-arily involves the future of the whites also, and, indeed, the future of the Southern civilisation. In three of the Southern States—South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana—the blacks outnumbered the whites in 1380, and, as everywhere throujjhont the South, they exhibit the fecundity which is an acconipanimont of poverty, it is probable that at the next census they will outnumber the whites in Alabama also, and bo even with the whites in one or two other Statos. In South Carolina there wore sixty negroes to every thirty-nine whites;, in Mississippi, sixty-five negroes, to every forty-seven whites; in Louisiana, forty-eight negroes to every forty five whites. These are the proportions that prevailed through the States in what are called the ' black' districts—a name ominous of a separation already going on—the disproportion is more marked and striking. In these

• black' districts there are four, five anrl even seven blacks to every white person ; indeed, the precipitation of the blacks into the low bottom coast lands of South Carolina and the river and bajou lands in Louisiana is forcing the whites to seek homes elsewhere and abandon the soil to the inferior race whose presence in overpowering numbers benumbs all enterprise, arrests progress and stifles civilisation. The sum and substance of Mr Froude'3 observations in the Antilles is that while they are still under the nominal rule of the British Government, they are absolutely lost to Anglo-Saxonism. The English language still prevails in Bermnda, the Bahamas. Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad,

Bb. Lucia and other British Islands, and always will; but the population is black, not white—African, not English ; and the islands have ceased to have any value to the British people, except as military and naval stations in a quarter of the globe where military and naval stations are little needed.