These figures of occupations seem to me to furnish the best statistical clue yet obtained for an understanding of the industrial and social changes affecting this question in the South. My interpretation of their meaning might be objected to on the ground that when the negroes are increasing more slowly than the whites, as they are at present in the South, it should not be expected that they would increase as fast as whites in the skilled occupations. This objection seems to me to invert the true order of causation, to put the cart before the horse. Should we not rather say that southern negroes are increasing at the present time only two-thirds as fast as southern whites, while from 1800 to 1840 they increased faster and from 1840 to 1880 nearly as fast, because they are not succeeding in entering new occupations or prospering as well in their old as the competing race is doing?
If this view of the process is correct, then one may add in closing that, as these occupation figures throw much light upon the causes, so the figures of an almost stationary death-rate for negroes compared with a rapidly decreasing death-rate for whites, and an apparently declining birth-rate for negroes compared with an actually increasing birth-rate for southern whites, are the best statistical keys to its effects.
Walter F. Willcox.
Cornell University.
[FOOTNOTE:]
[1] See especially Census Bulletin 8 entitled “Negroes in the United States,” Washington, 1904.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
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