reciprocal
desire in both races to remain ethnically separate will gain the day.

Many people think that the coloured people in South Africa, who are most
numerous in the vicinity of Cape Town, but are also scattered all over
the country, will form, as it were, a bridge between the two sections of
the population for their eventual coalescence. But when this conclusion
is closely examined it is seen to rest on debatable premises, for it is
admitted that by far the greater part of the miscegenation that is now
going on is between white men and coloured or black women and not
between coloured or black men and white women, from which it follows, as
has been pointed out by Boas,[24] that, as the numbers of children born
does not depend upon the numbers of men but upon the numbers of women,
the result will be a bleaching of the black element, here and there,
and not a darkening of the whites in South Africa.

Statistics have, indeed, been quoted which show that between the year
1904 and the year 1911 the coloured population increased in the Cape
Province by fifteen per cent, while the total population increased by
only six and a half per cent., but these figures do not show how much of
the coloured increase is due to propagation among coloured people
themselves and how much to unions between white men and coloured women.
When it is noted that in the year 1911 the European increase over the
year 1904 in the whole Union of South Africa was 14.28 per cent., and
that of all non-European elements only 15.12 per cent., it will be seen
that although the black increase is on a larger basis it hardly
justifies alarm over an imagined flood of overwhelming coloured numbers.

If the coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the
coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those
who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility,
while if the increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men
with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section
is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of
absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of a certain, even a
large, number of coloured people for many generations to come, but this
number will grow smaller, and not greater, as time goes on because there
is no reason to doubt that the white women of South Africa, as a whole,
will refrain in the future as they have refrained in the past from
cohabit