approximately correct may be seen by comparing the increase in this decade with the gain in others which have preceded it. Any alleged fact that is without the pale of probability stands impeached at the very threshold of the inquiry, and must be verified by competent evidence.” Basing his estimates upon the school census, the Senator continues: “The state of Texas is deprived, by the incorrect returns, of at least three representatives in Congress. Alabama loses 240,000, Tennessee and North Carolina 170,000 each, and Virginia, Kentucky, and Louisiana 100,000 each.”[10] Whatever force there may be in the protest of the eloquent Texas Senator, applies with special emphasis to the colored element; for it goes without saying that errors in enumeration in the South would be confined mainly to the Negro race, and since the bulk of the race is confined to this section such errors would have a most disastrous effect upon its rate of increase as shown by the census reports.

The following table exhibits the development of the colored population for the last one hundred years, as well as its decennial rates of increase and percentage of the total population.

Colored Population of the United States.

If we begin with 1810, the first census year after the constitutional suppression of the slave trade, we see from this table that the growth of the Negro element followed the ordinary law of population, viz: a gradual decline in the rate of increase. In 70 years the decennial rate of increase declined from about 30 per cent to 22 per cent. But from 1880 to 1890 there was a per saltum decrease from 22 to 13 per cent—that is, the decline in ten years was equal to that of the previous seventy. And all this has happened during an era of profound peace and prosperity, when the Negro population was subject to no great perturbing influences. When a number of observations follow with reasonable uniformity a fixed law, but a single result deviates widely from this law it is usual to suspect the accuracy of the discrepant observation. The author nowhere assigns any adequate cause for this sudden “slump” in the increase of the colored population. Instead of attributing it, in part at least, to the probable imperfection of the eleventh census, he relies wholly upon a blind force recently discovered and named by him “race traits and tendencies.” The capriciousness of this new factor, in that it may suspend operation indefinitely or break loose in a day, does not seem to have occurred to the author, at least it does not seem to affect the confident assurance with which he relies upon it. As has been shrewdly remarked by an able reviewer, “It would seem incumbent on him (Mr. Hoffman) further to prove that these race traits, after being held in abeyance for at least a century, first took decisive action in the decade 1880 to 1890.”[12]

In 1810 there were 1,377,808 Negroes in the United States. In 80 years this number had swollen to at least 7,470,040, and that, too, without reinforcement from outside immigration. It more than quintupled itself in eight decades. Does it not require much fuller demonstration than the author anywhere presents to convince the ordinary mind that a people that has shown such physical vitality for so long a period, has all at once, in a single decade, become comparatively infecund and threatened with extinction?

It is passing strange that it escaped the attention of a statistician of Mr. Hoffman’s sagacity that, even granting the accuracy of the eleventh census, the natural increase of the Negro race was greater than that of the whites during the last decade. The number of immigrants who came to this country between 1880 and 1890 was 5,246,613. I am informed by the census bureau that this number does not include the immigrants who came from British North America and from Mexico after 1885. This number was estimated by the statistical bureau of the Treasury Department to be 540,000, making the total number of immigrants 5,787,613. If this number be subtracted from the increase of the white population during the last decade (11,589,920) their rate of increase will be reduced to 13.35 per cent as compared with 13.51 per cent for the blacks. Nor is this all. The immigrants were for the most part in the full maturity and vigor of their productive powers, being the most fecund element of our white population. If allowance be made for their natural increase from 1880 to 1890 the white race would show a decennial increase appreciably below that of the blacks. If the Negro, then, is threatened with extinction, the white race is in a still more pitiable plight.

The table on page 6 does