The question is frequently raised whether the negro is inferior by nature to the white man or not. It is obvious from what has been said that the negro may, on the side of his instinctive or hereditary equipment, be inferior to the white man in his natural adaptiveness to a complex civilization existing under very different climatic conditions from those in which he was evolved. This does not mean, however, that the negro is in any sense a degenerate. On the contrary, from the point of view of a tropical environment, as we have already made plain, the negro may be regarded as the white man's superior. It is only in countries out of his own natural environment, under strange conditions of life to which he has not yet become biologically adapted, that the negro is inferior to the white man. In Africa he is the white man's superior if we adopt survival as the test of superiority. Influence of Slavery on the Negro.--There is no longer any doubt that the influence of slavery on the negro, as a form of industry, was both beneficent and maleficent. The negroes brought to America by the slave traders were subject to a very severe artificial selection, which, perhaps, secured a better type of negro physically on the whole, and a more docile type mentally; but the chief beneficent influence of slavery on the negro was that it taught him to work, to some extent at least. Moreover, it gave the negro the Anglo-Saxon tongue and the rudiments of our morality, religion, and civilization. On the other hand, slavery did not fit the individual or the race for a life of freedom, and did not raise moral standards much above those of Africa. The monogamic form of the family was, to be sure, enforced upon the slaves, but the family life was often broken up; for even when the owner of the slaves was kind-hearted and humane, on his death his property would be sold and the families of his slaves scattered. Under such conditions it is not surprising that the negro learned little of family morality. Again, being property himself, the negro could not be taught properly to appreciate the rights of property. Finally slavery failed to develop in the slave that self-mastery and self-control which are necessary for free social life. Admirable as slavery was in some ways as a school for an uncultivated people, it failed utterly in other ways; and it surely should not be difficult to devise methods of training at the present time which are superior to anything that slavery as a school for the industrial training of the negro could possibly have accomplished. Statistics of the Negro Problem in the United States. The following table will show the percentage of negroes in the population of the United States at different decades (Negro, in census terminology, includes all persons of negro descent): Per cent.