[30] For a minute study of birth and death rates, see _infra_, pp. 225-49. [31] To be sure, this charge holds in only very modified degree of the modern sanitated city. Moreover, the gloomy hopelessness of the situation must become apparent as the decades glide by. The Negro must feel that competition is becoming sharper, that his territory is becoming narrower and narrower, that twentieth-century citizenship is, like the Gospel commandment, made for those who can receive it, that he is unequal to the load cast upon him, that he is sinking beneath the burden of an honour unto which he was not born. Herewith the joyousness of life must depart, the old-time buoyancy of the race give place to a deepening despond.[32] As the generations pass on, the Negro will be hemmed every way within straiter and straiter limits, his numbers will decrease, his digit will move further to the right in the great sum of humanity--slowly, silently, steadily he will be driven to the wall. Possibly he may emigrate in large numbers to some tropical clime which nature has forbidden to the Caucasian. This would indeed be the happiest possible solution for the South, and he would be a courageous seer who would declare that this century will not see a large exodus of Negroes from the Gulf region. But we do not believe that such emigration will go northward. Our Northern friends have no more affection or use for the Negro than have we. They love to pet him and let their benevolence play about him--this so long as they can patronize him, can "offer him financial assistance," and "stick a diamond pin in his coat," and lay at his feet "the Presidency of Haiti as soon as it is conquered by an expedition now under preparation." Besides, his vote is a very important weight to throw into the scale in cases of doubtful elections. But once let the Blacks turn their faces northward in great numbers, let them begin to swarm by myriads, and derange the labour conditions, and drag down the scale of wages, and oust the Whites from their places--then philanthropy will be thrown to the winds, and the arm of the government at Washington will not be strong enough or long enough to guard these wards of the nation from violence and persecution and outrage.[33] [32] What a note of infinite melancholy sounds through "The Souls of Black Folk," the finest product of the Mulatto mind. In his "The College-bred Negro," the same author, Dubois, has put the question as to the future of his race to hundreds of these representative Negroes and recorded their answers. It is easy to perceive that the hopefulness of the majority is quite artificial, based on some religious faith or moral trust, and that the really weighty answers are given by the hopeless minority.