The number of mulattoes is less important than their character and general relation to the negro problem. Most Southerners assert and doubtless believe that the mulatto is physically weak; but you see them working side by side with pure blacks, as roustabouts and plantation hands, and some planters tell you that one is as good as another in the field. People assert that mulattoes are more susceptible to disease, so that they are dying out; and some authorities say that there are no mulatto children after the third or fourth generation. There is no scientific ground for these assertions, and one of the highest medical authorities in the South is of the conviction that except for a somewhat greater liability to tuberculosis they are as healthy as the full bloods. Of course, the greater number of mulattoes in the United States are the children of mulattoes, and to what extent the proportion is kept up by further accessions from the white race is absolutely impossible to determine. Many statements on the whole subject come from people who hate the mulatto and like to think that he is a poor creature who is going to relieve the world of a disagreeable problem by leaving it. From the same source comes the assertion that the mulatto is fundamentally vicious, frequently made by people who argue in the same breath that the so-called progress of the negro race means nothing, because it is all due to mulattoes. The mulattoes do include a much larger proportion of the educated than the pure bloods, and hence are more likely to furnish such criminals as forgers and embezzlers; but there seems no ground for the widespread belief that the mulattoes are more criminal than the pure blacks. That there is a special temptation more likely to come to some members of the mulatto section than to the pure black was suggested by a Southern gentleman when he said: "The black girls won't work and the yellow girls don't have to, they are looked after!" When asked to suggest who it was who looked after them, the conversation languished. The question of the character of the mulatto is a serious one, because most of the spokesmen and markedly successful people of the race are not pure bloods; and because of the unhappy position of thousands of men and women who have the aptitudes, the tastes, and the educations of white people; yet in the common estimation are bracketed with the rudest, most ignorant and lowest of a crude, ignorant and low race.