The American negro is passing. The mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, strike the first notes in the octave of his evolution--or his decadence, or extinction, or whatever you may call it. The black negro is rare North and South. Negroes go North, white Northerners come South. In States sanctioning intermarriage, irregular connections obtain as elsewhere between white men and black women; and, in addition, between black men and white women of most degraded type or foreigners who are without the saving American race prejudice. Recent exposure of the "White Slave Syndicate" in New York which kidnapped white girls for negro bagnios, is fresh in the public mind. Under slavery many negroes learned to value and to practice virtue; many value and practice it now; but the freedwoman has been on the whole less chaste than the bond. With emancipation the race suffered relapse in this as in other respects. The South did not do her whole duty in teaching chastity to the savage, though making more patient, persistent and heroic struggle than accredited with. The charge that under slavery miscegenation was the result of compulsion on the part of the superior race finds answer in its continuance since. Because he was white, the crying sin was the white man's, but it is just to remember that the heaviest part of the white racial burden was the African woman, of strong sex instincts and devoid of a sexual conscience, at the white man's door, in the white man's dwelling.[28] In 1900, negroes constituted 20.4 per cent. of the population of Texas, the lowest rate for the Southern States; in Mississippi, 58.6, the highest. In Massachusetts, they were less than two per cent. Questions of social intermingling can not be of such practical and poignant concern to Massachusetts as to Mississippi, where amalgamation would result in a population of mulatto degenerates. Prohibitions are protective to both races. Fortunately, miscegenation proceeds most slowly in the sections of negro concentration, the sugar and cotton lands of the lower South. In these, it is also said, there is lower percentage of negro crime of all kinds than where negroes are of lighter hue. Thinkers of both races have declared amalgamation an improbable, undesirable conclusion of the race question; that it would be a propagation of the vices of both races and the virtues of neither. In a letter (March 30, 1865) to the Louisville "Courier-Journal," recently reproduced in "The Outlook," Mr. Beecher said: "I do not think it wise that whites and blacks should mix blood ... it is to be discouraged on grounds of humanity." Senator Ingalls said: "Fred Douglas once said to me: 'The races will blend, coalesce, and become homogeneous.' I do not agree with him. There is no affinity between the races; this solution is impossible.... There is no blood-poison so fatal as the adulteration of race."