344 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ency has been rather to drift apart, there has, on the other hand, been 

 no strong inclination on the part of the freedmen to abandon the 

 South. AYhat Mr. Cable calls the "vast, vague afrite of amalgama- 

 tion," which was once a real power in the land, seems, through the 

 repulsion born of conflict and changed relations, to have lost its po- 

 tency for either good or evil. Mr. Cable accounts for its absence in 

 the North by insisting that the Northerners were guided not by in- 

 stinct, but by " the better dictates of reason and the ordinary natural 

 preferences of like for like." * Has the reign of reason begun in the 

 South also ? Or, as political antipathies grow feeble, will the Cauca- 

 sian fastidiousness that grew strong with them also languish and 

 fade? At any rate, some of the best men in the South, as in the 

 North, are standing out courageously for the removal of all degrad- 

 ing disabilities from the colored people, and freeing them from the 

 bondage of restrictions that debase them in their own eyes and in 

 the eyes of the world. If Bishop Dudley's vision of the future be 

 prophetic, and the day be coming, though still far off, when there 

 shall be no more, except as occasional visitants from other lands, 

 either white or black, or red or yellow, within the enlarged confines 

 of the world's great republic, then it is only reasonable that the fore- 

 fathers of the race that is to be should be at liberty to make what 

 alliances please or suit them without being called to account for doing 

 so. There is little danger of the transformation taking place too 

 rapidly, but no excommunications will retard it, if it is to be. As 

 the Hon. Cassius M. Clay says on this very subject, " Here, as else- 

 where, we rest upon the survival of the fittest, and we shall see what 

 we shall see." 



The presence of the Chinese on this continent adds still further to 

 the complications of the race problem. That, where they obtain a 

 hold in a white community, intermarriage ensues has been shown by 

 the recent census of Victoria, Australia, where one hundred and sixty 

 persons were returned as half-castes. In the report of the commission 

 appointed by the Canadian Government for the purpose of inquiring 

 into the whole subject of Chinese immigration, Dr. Stout, of San Fran- 

 cisco, testifies that such unions had taken place there. Whether the 

 measures adopted for the exclusion of the Chinese will permanently 

 arrest the incoming tide is very doubtful. That the superfluous 

 hordes of Mongols and Tartars will once more cross the limits of race 

 and invade, with force resistless, the strongholds of Western civiliza- 

 tion, is the belief of men who are far from being mere dreamers. 

 Though that deluge may not come in our day, plain forewarnings of 

 its approach are not wanting. China has already entered on the path 

 of railway enterprise, and, when the extension of means of communica- 

 tion shall have shortened the overland route to Europe, the drama of 

 Attila may be re-enacted in a new form. 



* " The Silent South " in "The Century," September, 1885. 



