MOVEMENT OF THE COLORED POPULATION. 789 



of labor, with characteristic indifference to their employers' interest. 

 They are not generally satisfactory help. If they stay North, they 

 live from hand to mouth, and when they die the town has to bury 

 them. A few return to the warmer climate of the South where wants 

 are less m-gent and more easily supplied, and where the work to be 

 done is simpler in form and better adapted to their habits. There is, 

 therefore, a mild form of counter-exodus. 



No doubt many portions even of the planting-regions in the older 

 Southern States will admit of a still denser colored population. And 

 while this continues to be the case no continuous heavy emigration is 

 to be expected. But the filling-up process will go on, and, when there 

 is crowding, relief will be had by emigration, if it is possible. The 

 richest portions of the country South are breeding-lands, whence must 

 flow increasing streams of colored migration, mainly to the westward, 

 as the last census indicates. At any rate, they will flow in the direc- 

 tion of least resistance ; and such are the forces which guide them, 

 whether they flow westward or northward, that the people they bear 

 become very thoroughly interdiffused among the whites. And while 

 they are less thrifty than white people generally, all are not so. There 

 are two distinct classes of colored economists. One is satisfied with 

 dependence on others for employment ; the other affects independent 

 homes, and struggles to secure them, however humble. Some even 

 acquire wealth. With wealth and independence will come greater 

 respect. Gradually will the race-prejudice weaken. Now there are 

 occasional marriages across the color-line ; then they will be more fre- 

 quent. This will accelerate the relative increase of the colored people, 

 and the Caucasianizing of the colored race. Even now they are no 

 longer negroes. One third has a large infusion of white blood, an- 

 other third has less, but still some, and of the other third it would be 

 diflicult to find an assured specimen of pure African blood. 



An English writer of distinction has found the solution of the 

 American race question, in the blending of the white and colored ele- 

 ments, in tbe production of an improved type of man. We who are on 

 the ground are generally skeptical as to the benefit thus to accrue ; and 

 it is not at all likely that amalgamation will ever be complete, under 

 the reign of whatever physiological philosophy. Nature does not act 

 in that thorough way ; and philosophy does little to coerce Nature. 

 Race prejudices and antipathies may abate, but they never wholly die 

 out. Even after the plebeians and patricians might intermarry and 

 the former be consuls, the patrician dames would relent none of their 

 inherited scorn and antipathy for their plebeian rivals. Such preju- 

 dice is imbibed as unconsciously, but as surely, as nourishment from 

 the mother's breast. It never ends. There will always be a colored 

 race, of more uniform and lighter shade than at present, and always a 

 white, even though branches of it perish in the fatal folds of luxury 

 and dissipation. It will not end by amalgamation with the colored 



