South Carolina, laden with Negroes to the very gunwales by the subjects of “King Cotton,” emerged from the storm of war with a Negro majority of 126,147, which Reconstruction speedily increased in “The Prostrate State” to 213,229 by 1880, a number so far beyond her small white population, that even with a decreasing rate of increase, the black majority had increased by 1890 to 226,926, the decrease of which in 1900 was barely perceptible; but by 1910 had fallen to 156,681 and in 1920 was still further reduced to 45,941. And even Mississippi, whose Negro majority rose steadily from 31,305 in 1870, to 266,430 in 1900, dropped in 1910 to 223,338, which by 1920 had fallen to 81,222. This is in all probability due to the migration which Carlyle McKinley predicted in 1889, although Hoffman, who published a painstaking work in 1896, thinking to establish that the Negro was dying out, as “in the Northern States the colored race does not hold his own, for the deaths out number the births,” yet concluded that the Negro was— “in the South as a permanent factor, with neither the ability nor the inclination to leave.”[304] As in the North and West the numbers of the Negroes have since 1870 to 1920 risen from 250,000 to 1,550,000 and in the South during the same time from 4,585,000 to 8,990,000, the two assertions above do not hang together. When we consider the view advanced by that great writer, the author of “The American Commonwealth”, we find it very difficult for him to shake himself loose from the impression that the Negro must remain in the South, and that it is best that he should, although what he says, himself, would seem to disprove the assertion. He finds first evidently by consideration of the census figures up to 1900, that: “It is thus clear that the Negro center of population is more southward and that the African is leaving the colder, higher and drier lands for regions more resembling his ancient seats in the Old World.”[305] Carlyle McKinley, with more prophetic ken, eleven years earlier foresaw this, but also beyond what is shown above, that from this region the Negro would move out, North and West. Mr. Bryce finds: “In these hot lowlands the Negro lives much as he lived on the plantations in the old days, except that he works less, because a moderate amount of labor produces enough for his bare subsistence ... he is scarcely at all in contact with any one above his own condition. Thus there are places, the cities especially, where the Negro is improving industrially because he has to work hard and comes into constant relation with the whites; and others where he need work very little, and where being left to his own resources, he is in danger of relapsing into barbarism.” The writer lays it down specifically: