handicap the whites." "Notwithstanding the fact that the Negroes were aided and the whites downcast during these dark years, the white population has grown with great and increasing rapidity." "The conditions to which the white race is subject will probably never again be so unfortunate, the conditions to which the Negro race is subject will not soon, if ever, be so favorable as during the years after the Civil War." Yet notice some of the changes that have occurred during the thirty years from 1860 to 1890, brief span as this is in the life of a race. [35] Witness Schweinfurth, one of the carefulest observers and highest authorities: "If we could at once grasp and set before our minds facts that are known (whether as regards language, race, culture, history, or development) of that vast region of the world which is comprehended in the name of Africa, we should have before us the witness of an intermingling of races which is beyond all precedent. And yet, bewildering as the prospect would appear, it remains a fact not to be gainsaid, that it is impossible for any one to survey the country as a whole without perceiving that, high above the multiplication of individual differences, there is throned a principle of unity (he refers to the autochthonous black stock), which embraces well-nigh all the population" (_Heart of Africa_, Vol. I., p. 313). "The black belt may be defined as those counties in which the Negro population outnumbered the white. In Maryland in 1860 there were five such counties, and in 1890 only two. In Virginia there were forty-three and in 1890 only thirty-three. In North Carolina there were nineteen and in 1890 only sixteen. The group of adjoining counties in southeastern Maryland, eastern Virginia and northeast North Carolina, which formed the most northerly outpost of the black belt in 1860, has decreased in thirty years from sixty-two counties to forty-six, or almost exactly one-fourth. In 1860 Kentucky had one county belonging to the black belt, while in 1890 it had none. In 1860 northern Alabama had two counties belonging to the black belt, but in 1890 both of these had disappeared from the map. In the cotton-growing regions of the more southerly States there has been an increase of the counties belonging to the black belt, but not enough entirely to offset these changes. It seems that locally the Negroes have begun to yield ground to the whites in the regions most favorable to the latter, and that such a change is likely to continue.