146 Coming Shadows : [March, 
as a body, saw what the future might have in store. A few 
clear-headed men, indeed, advocated the removal of the 
negro element in mass — their re-shipment to West Africa ; 
but they were denounced by the one party as covert Aboli- 
tionists, and the other accused them of inhumanity. Above 
all, the rate of increase of the negro population was totally 
unsuspected. Men comforted themselves with the imaginary 
ethnological law that a lower race, placed in contact with a 
higher, tends, in some mysterious manner, to decline, and 
ultimately passes away. This supposed law is founded upon 
a very imperfect generalisation. It held good in the case 
of the North American “ Indians.” It holds good with the 
aborigines of Australia, and even with the Maoris. It does 
not hold good with the African blacks, who — like mice, rats, 
house-flies, &c. — seem to multiply more rapidly when brought 
in contact with civilisation than when left to themselves. 
At the time of the forcible emancipation of the negro 
slaves in the American Union they numbered, it is supposed, 
about four millions. For the decade i860 to 1870 the census 
gives no very trustworthy results. The disturbance arising 
from the long civil war, and the very imperfeCt manner in 
which the population of the Slave States had previously been 
enumerated, combined to render estimates of negro increase 
during that term of years open to question. But the census 
of 1880 showed an alarming result, — alarming not merely to 
Americans, but to us in England. It proved that the 
emancipated negro population was increasing at the rate of 
3J- per cent per annum, and was consequently doubling itself 
every twenty years. The white population for the whole of 
the United States, on the contrary, was found to be increasing 
at the rate of 2 per cent per annum onty, doubling itself, 
therefore, every thirty-five years. Hence it may easily be 
calculated that, if these respective rates of increase con- 
tinue, the blacks must outnumber the whites. Prof. E. W. 
Gilliam (“ Popular Science Monthly ”), from whom I borrow 
the numerical results already given, states that in the United 
States, taken as a whole, the whites will in 1985 number 
336 millions, whilst the blacks in 1980 will amount to 192 
millions, and will about double the number of the whites in 
the Southern States. Consequently in 2000 the blacks will 
reach 384 millions, and in 2020 actually 768 millions. In 
the same year the number of whites will be only 672 millions. 
Hence by that year the blacks will have a clear majority of 
100 millions, and will be virtually the sovereigns of the 
United States. The Anglo-Saxon Republic will have become 
substantially a Negro Republic, and every decade will more 
