INCREASE OF THE COLORED POPULATION. 669 



living children, which surpasses anything of the kind among the 

 whites. I have three negro tenants on my farm, and among them they 

 have fourteen children ; and for health, flesh, and vigor, I would com- 

 pare them with any children at the North or elsewhere." It is proba- 

 ble that the advantage of the colored, in the matter of numbers, comes, 

 not from unusual conservation of the living, but from early marriages 

 under ordinary circumstances, and the rapidity with which children are 

 born in the same family, and also, as the census reports show, from the 

 greater tenacity of life from middle age onward. For these reasons 

 mortality might be absolutely greater among the colored, and they 

 still far outstrip the whites in the multiplication of numbers. But 

 there is nothing in the form of positive evidence to show that, in the 

 rural districts of the South, mortality is any greater among colored 

 than among white children. 



The colored increase of the last decade, as shown by the census, 

 does not so far transcend the increase of the early decades of the cen- 

 tury as to render it at all incredible ; and yet, such are the conditions 

 under which this has taken place, that it is no doubt to a certain ex- 

 tent exceptional, and will not be repeated in the future. It is quite 

 safe to predict that the next decade will not show so large a percent- 

 age of increase as the last. No doubt the forthcoming " Census Re- 

 port " will show a greater proportion than usual of colored children in 

 the South from one to ten or twelve years of age. Reproduction will 

 cease in a considerable percentage of these families before the close of 

 the current decade ; and, of those born during the last decade, not a 

 very large proportion will marry before the beginning of the next dec- 

 ade. If this view has truth in it, and there should be no disturbing 

 conditions, the rate of increase among the colored in the South will be 

 greater from 1890 to 1900 than from 1880 to 1890, but not so great as 

 from 1870 to 1880 (theory of Reichenbach ; "Report of the Eighth 

 Census," Introduction, viii). But, however this may be, no amount of 

 question concerning the last two censuses, the ninth and tenth, can so 

 far invalidate them, but they show the high probability that both free- 

 dom and diffusion in peace are favorable, rather than otherwise, to the 

 multiplication of the colored race. This is so, even allowing a good 

 margin for error in the census of 1870. So far as the census of 1880 

 covers the ground, it does not afford merely the evidence of negation ; 

 it is positive, and not likely ever to be shaken. 



The aggregate white population of the sixteen Southern States 

 and the District of Columbia was 9,466,355 in 1870, and 12,577,215 

 in 1880, the percentage of increase during the decade being 32*9. The 

 aggregate white population of the twenty-two Northern States in 1870 

 was 23,864,272, and in 1880, 30,257,557, the percentage of increase be- 

 ing 26 8. Then we have for the last decade, increase of whites in the 

 North, 26'8 ; increase of whites in the South, 32*9 ; and increase of 

 colored in the United States, 34*8 per cent. It should be observed that 



