390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



with an antagonist that must sooner or later press him to the 

 wall, and in conformity to his racial instincts the African will 

 move on farther and farther southward. 



The number of farms at the South has increased rapidly since 

 the war. This does not mean more land, but the subdivision of 

 the larger estates of the past into smaller holdings, and an in- 

 crease in the number of white yeoman farmers who do their own 

 labor. Besides these circumstances, the census of 1890, contrary to 

 the general idea, showed that the natural rate of increase of popu- 

 lation among the Southern whites over the negro was almost in 

 the ratio of two to one. The effect of this excess of white in- 

 crease is apparent, and besides it is by no means probable that 

 the white inhabitants of the South are not to be added to by 

 large immigration from the North. The granting of the suffrage 

 to the negro, partly through a misguided and in part a pretended 

 friendship, will aid to further his displacement, for his aspira- 

 tions as a politician have not been favorable to his success as a 

 laborer and the betterment of his material condition. Neither 

 the sword and bayonet nor plague and pestilence are necessary to 

 a work of uprooting, for by a natural racial and economic law 

 the negro will be driven out and supplanted by the white, and 

 Louis Blanc's theory of extermination be illustrated as never be- 

 fore. There was a certain fitness in the emancipation proclama- 

 tion being signed, when it came to be, by Abraham Lincoln, a 

 representative of that class of Southern whites upon whom the 

 institution of slavery had borne most hardly, and who were 

 crowded out of the slaveholding districts. Time and the de- 

 velopments of the future will show more and more that in slav- 

 ery the negro found his preservation, but the laboring white his 

 curse. The historian Green tells us that after the Norman con- 

 quest there was among the English people " an immense outburst 

 of material and intellectual activity/' and that " the long men- 

 tal inactivity of feudal Europe broke up like ice before a summer 

 sun." It would be anything but correct to refer to the " mental 

 inactivity " of the ante-bellum South, for in the lines that its 

 talents were exerted it showed an ability fully equal to that of 

 any other section, but the incubus upon its material growth, and 

 the problems which then demanded its intellectual energies, are 

 now in a large measure removed ; and we may say of the South, 

 as Green does of the England of King John, that it is " quickened 

 with a new life and throbbing with a new energy." We need 

 not fear the effects of an enervating climate or Southern sun. 

 The upper tier of Southern States and the Southern Appalachian 

 region form probably the best climate on the Atlantic side of the 

 continent, and in the more Southern States, such as Alabama and 

 Louisiana, while the summers are longer, yet the heat of the sun 



