666 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It will be seen that the ratio of increase in the colored population 

 had fallen off somewhat before emancipation, although the proportion 

 of fugitives was less from 1850 to 1860 than from 1840 to 1850. By 

 the annexation of Texas, 59,000 colored wxre added to the census of 

 1850. Florida was first counted in 1830, with 16,000 colored. Lou- 

 isiana was purchased in 1803, adding about 30,000 colored to the 

 census of 1810. The slave-trade closed in 1808. 



The ratio of increase in the white population was less disturbed by 

 the acquisitions of territory and people. Immigration is the very large 

 factor which here swells the ratio of increase, and this more in later 

 decades than in the earlier ones. During the first decade (1790-1800) 

 the number of immigrants was about 43,000 ; during the second, 

 60,000 ; during the third, 98,000 ; during the fourth, 150,000 ; during 

 the fifth, 600,000 ; during the sixth, 1,700,000 ; during the seventh, 

 2,500,000 ; during the eighth, 2,400,000 ; and, during the ninth, 

 2,800,000. It should be kept in mind that, in 1870, there were over 

 10,000,000 w^hites in the United States whose mothers were of for- 

 eign birth, being 30 per cent, of the entire white population. The 

 tide of immigration received a check during the w^ar (1861-'65), and 

 also during the period of commercial depression, 1874-'79. The war, 

 by checking immigration, marriage, and the fruitfulness of marriage, 

 and by the outright destruction of human life, greatly reduced the 

 percentage of increase during the eighth decade. The check which 

 the hard times gave to immigration reduced the percentage of in- 

 crease for the ninth decade below the figure it would otherwise have 

 reached. But, after making all allowances for the advantages which 

 immigration gives to the white population, it is probable that from 

 1810 to 1860 the w^hites multij^lied somewhat more rapidly than the 

 colored people. 



The ratio of increase of the colored population, though declining, 

 was quite uniform till the decade 1860-'70. Two classes of influences 

 were then vigorously at work to reduce the ratio a war which largely 

 concerned the colored people, and the transition from the servile to 

 the free condition. The whole decade was an unsettled period, with 

 every influence against the rapid multiplication of the freed race. The 

 rate of increase for that decade was a little less than 10 per cent. less 

 than half what it had been the previous decade. The percentage of 

 increase for the decade 1870-'80 is quite surprising. As it has taken 

 place under freedom, it contravenes all the prejudices and upsets most 

 of the philosophies. One w^oiild naturally have supposed, from the 

 reputed bad treatment and destruction of freedmen in the South and 

 the preordained tendency of an inferior people to decline in presence 

 of a superior, that the colored race would be dying out, instead of in- 

 creasing at the marvelous rate of 34 per cent, in ten years. 



Previous to emancipation, it was a current opinion, not only among 

 slaveholders but among others, that slavery w^as conservative of the 



