ies
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 indeed show plainly that the Negro does not
hold his own as a numerical factor of our mixed population. Whereas he
represented 19 per cent of the entire population in 1810 he now
represents only 12 per cent. But the cause of this relative decline is
apparent enough. It is due to white immigration and not to "race traits"
as Mr. Hoffman would have us believe. It would be as legitimate to
a