29
1860, 4,002,996 798,683 25

The average increase in every ten years during the seventy years has
been about 28 per cent.

INCREASE OF WHOLE POPULATION, INCLUDING SLAVES
AND EMIGRANTS

Years. Population. Increase. Per ct. of
Increase.
1790, 3,929,872 1,376,080
1800, 5,305,952 1,376,080 37
1810, 7,239,814 1,933,862 36
1820, 9,688,131 2,398,817 33
1830, 12,866,920 3,228,789 34
1840, 17,063,353 4,196,433 33
1850, 23,191,876 6,128,523 36
1860, 31,676,217 8,484,341 36

The average increase in every ten years would be about 35 per cent.

Deducting from this latter table the slaves, the emigrants, and children
born of emigrants, now included in it, and the ratio of increase is
below 27 per cent every ten years. So that if anything should occur to
check the tide of emigration, the blacks in this country would increase
in a faster ratio than the whites.

We can form some idea as to the danger of such a check, when we advert
to the fact that the emigration which in 1854 was 427,833, fell off in
1858 to 144,652.

To finish the picture which these figures present to us, let us carry
the mind forward a decade or two. At the average rate of increase of the
blacks, namely, 28 per cent, we shall have, of the slave population
alone, and excluding the free blacks, 5,060,585 in 1870, and 6,577,584
in 1880. And by that time they will be increasing at the rate of 150,000
to 200,000 a year.

Carl Schurz, in his speech at the Cooper Institute, in New-York, put to
his audience a pertinent inquiry: 'You ask me, What shall we do with our
negroes, who are now 4,000,000? And I ask you, What will you do with
them when they will be 8,000,000--or rather, _what will they do with
you?_ Surely, surely the question involves the greatest problem of the
age.

If our fathers had met the question seventy years ago, we should not now
behold the spectacle of 6,000,000 of our people in rebellion, and an
army of 400,000 men arrayed against the integrity of the Union. And we
may well profit by the example so far as to ask ourselves the question,
What will be the condition of our country and of our posterity, fifty
years hence, if we, too, shirk the question as painful and difficult of
solution?

Whether ultimate a