Knight’s Key is but a temporary settlement with a wharf, a railway yard, and one or two warehouses. Thence the comfortable little steamship Miami conveyed us in about five hours to Key West, and in another seven or eight hours to Havana—from the New World to the Old.
PART II
THE PROBLEM FACED
II
THE PROBLEM FACED
The Southern States of North America at present offer to the world a spectacle unexampled in history. It is the spectacle of two races, at the opposite extremes of the colour scale, forced to live together in numbers not very far from equal, and on a theoretic basis of political equality. In other regions where white men and black have come into close contact, the circumstances have been, and are, essentially different. In the greater part of Africa the white man is a conquering invader, living among blacks who are either entirely savage, or obviously and confessedly but little removed from savagery. No question of “social equality” arises, and the question of political rights, where it presents itself at all, is uncomplicated by any predetermined constitutional principle. In a large part of Spanish America there has been so free an intermixture of many races that it is practically impossible to draw any colour line. Families of pure European descent may hold themselves apart, but few of these regions can by any strain of language be called “white men’s countries.”[[47]] In the British West Indies the whites are so small a percentage of the population as to constitute a natural aristocracy; and in most of the islands the two races live peaceably under the slightly tempered despotism of Crown Colony government. Moreover, the white West Indian, even though he may rarely cross the Atlantic, has always England behind him. He is a member of a great white community, which happens to control certain tropical islands, mainly inhabited by blacks. Here he may prefer to pitch his tent; but his essential citizenship is still British. His social and political relations with his black surroundings are not to him a matter of life and death. Whatever their local interest and importance, they do not touch the fountain-head of his polity, the homeland of his race.
But it is his only homeland that the Southern American finds himself compelled to share, on nominally equal terms, with a race which, whatever its merits or demerits, its possibilities or its impossibilities, stands at the extreme of physical dissimilarity from his own. This is a condition of life not easily understood by the European, and not always very vividly realized even by the Northern American. I have devoted some effort to realizing it, both by personal observation and through the medium of books. The details of my observations form the First Part of the present volume. In this Second Part I propose to set forth some of the large and essential facts of the situation, as nearly as I can ascertain them, and to state the general trend of the reflections these facts have suggested to me.
Numbers and Vitality of the Negro
In the first place, what are the facts as to the negro’s numbers, distribution, and rate of increase, if any? They are not easy to ascertain: partly because it is nine years since the last census was taken (1900); partly because American vital statistics are very scanty, and, where they can be obtained at all, are apt to be untrustworthy.
It would appear that, roughly speaking, one-third of the population of the seventeen Southern States is black or coloured. As against some 3 per cent. of negroes in the Northern and Western States, there are about 33 per cent. in the South. The total coloured population of the United States is generally set down at about ten million, nine million dwelling in the South and something over one million in the North and West.[[48]]
Now, are the negroes increasing? It used to be thought that they were multiplying very rapidly. Judge Tourgée, in 1884, prophesied that by 1900 they would outnumber the whites in every State from Maryland to Texas. This prediction is far from having fulfilled itself, and appears to have been based on defective enumeration in the census of 1870, which made the rate of negro increase between 1870 and 1880 seem quite inordinate. Now speculation has gone to the other extreme, and prophesies the not very distant extinction of the negro. This view is set forth with uncompromising emphasis by Mr. P. A. Bruce in his “Rise of the New South” (Philadelphia, 1905):
The only cloud of any portentousness hanging over the prospects of the Southern States is the continued expansion of the black population.... The fact, however, that the white inhabitants, as a body, are steadily outstripping the black in numbers, is an indication that the evils which are now created by the presence of so many negroes in the South will not relatively and proportionately grow more dangerous.... When the development of the Southern States along its present lines has reached its last stage, there is reason to think that an even greater relative decline in the numerical strength of the black population will set in. We have already pointed out the probable effect of the subdivision of Southern lands, and the growth of Southern towns, on the numerical expansion of the negro race. As injurious to that race in the end as being shut out of the general field of agriculture, or being subjected to an abnormally high rate of mortality, will be the relentless competition which is one of the conditions of modern life in all civilized communities. The vaster the growth of the Southern States in wealth and white population, the sharper and more urgent will be the struggle of the black man for existence. In order to hold even his present position as a common labourer he will have to exert himself to the utmost, and in doing so to submit to a manner of life that will be even more unwholesome and squalid than the one he now follows, and sure to lead to a great increase in the already very high rate of mortality for his race. The day will come in the South, just as it came long ago in the North, when for lack of skill, lack of sobriety, and lack of persistency, the negro will find it more difficult to stand up as a rival to the white working-man. Already it is the ultimate fate of the negro that is in the balance, not the ultimate fate of the Southern States in consequence of the presence of the negro. The darkest day for the Southern whites has passed.... The darkest day for the Southern blacks has only just begun.