t period
reaches but 10.41 per cent. in the slave population. Among the
free Colored in the Southern States, the admixture of races
appears to have progressed at a somewhat less ratio than at the
North, and we can only account for the greater proportionate
number of mulattoes in the North by the longer period of their
freedom in the midst of the dominant and more numerous race, and
the supposition of more mulattoes than blacks having escaped or
been manumitted from slavery."

Whatever merit this view possessed before the war of the Rebellion, it
is obsolete under the present organization of society. The
environments of the Negro, the downward tendencies of his social life,
and the exposed state in which slave laws left him, have all perished.
In addition to his aptitude for study and capacity for improvement, he
is now under the protecting and restraining influences of congenial
climate; and pure sociological laws will impart to his offspring the
power of reproduction and the ability to maintain an excellent social
footing with the other races of the world. The learned M. A.
DeQuatrefages says, concerning this question:

None of the eminent men with whom I regret to differ take any
account of the influence of the action of the surroundings. I
believe that the conditions of the surroundings play as important
a part in the crossing of races as they do in other matters. They
may sometimes favor, sometimes restrict, sometimes prevent, the
establishment of a mixed race. This simple consideration accounts
for many apparently contradictory facts. Etwick and Long have
affirmed that in Jamaica the mulattoes hold out only because they
are constantly recruited by the marriage of whites with
negresses. But in San Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, there
are, we may say, no whites, and the population consists of two
thirds mulattoes and one third negroes. The numbers of the
mulattoes are there well kept up by themselves without the
introduction of fresh blood. In respect to fertility; different
instances of crossing between individuals of the two same races
may give different results, according to the place where they are
effected. I believe it is unnecessary to insist and show that the
physical and physiological faculties of children born of mixed
unions ought to present analogous facts.