THE NEGRO.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IX, Issue 430, 8 July 1881, Page 14

THE NEGRO.

The American census for 1881 shows that the negro element has increased in ten years from something over four to nearly six millions, an increase which is more than the white race can show, and that too when it is considered that there has been no negro immigration. This increase will no doubt bring out a swarm of statists and political economists who will try to prove to the satisfaction of themselves, and some others, that the whole thing is owing to natural causes, which in fact is aa true as the go9pel, and they will also show that if the causes are not checked the negroes will go on increasing until they will be the supreme rulers of this continent, unless, indeed, a tremendous influx of Chinese spreading westward over the Rocky Mountains and filling the basin of the Mississippi, may in turn check their growth, and, perhaps, obtain the ascendency over them, which is due to education and industry. As, however, the influx has not yet appeared, and as the negroes are at present in possession of the field, it is with them the white race has to deal. They are a reality, whereas the Chinese are a shadow looming up in the distant future. It was foretold by a number of writers, pretending to be scientists and political economists, that when slavery was abolished the negroes would decline in numbers and ultimately disappear altogether from contact with the Caucasian, but the contrary is the actual fact ; they are multiplying, and if they continue to multiply in the future^as they have multiplied in the past decade, they must, according to the law of arithmetical progression, become more numerous than their white bredren, and perhaps dispossess them. We don't know whether it was the fear of this that impelled certain philanthropists to start a movement after the close of the war far a negro emigration to Liberia. We think not, but at all events it failed for the number that emigrated did not amount to much. After awhile the coloured population, feeling the South too small for them, developed a tendency to go west, and many of them went accordingly to Kansas, and even to Nebraska. But the movement was never very popular, and a year ago it ceased almost altogether. Of late a negro migration has received a new impetus from some undefinable cause and the American papers report them as again moving in sections to their beloved Kansas. We may presume that it is the most energetic of them who are leaving the South, for numbers of the uneducated coloured people prefer its warm climate, and its water melons and easy means of living, to the colder climate of the West ; but it is certain that those people live and piosper wherever the white man can, as witness the thrifty, well-to-do coloured population of Canada. If the migration we speak of extends itself it will form a problem to be solved in the near future, always bearing in mind the extraordinary increase in their numbers. — True Wittiest.