A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro: The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro: The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1
John Stuart Mill · en
It is passing strange that it escaped the attention of a statistician of
Mr. Hoffman's sagacity that, even granting the accuracy of the eleventh
census, the natural increase of the Negro race was greater than that of
the whites during the last decade. The number of immigrants who came to
this country between 1880 and 1890 was 5,246,613. I am informed by the
census bureau that this number does not include the immigrants who came
from British North America and from Mexico after 1885. This number was
estimated by the statistical bureau of the Treasury Department to be
540,000, making the total number of immigrants 5,787,613. If this number
be subtracted from the increase of the white population during the last
decade (11,589,920) their rate of increase will be reduced to 13.35 per
cent as compared with 13.51 per cent for the blacks. Nor is this all.
The immigrants were for the most part in the full maturity and vigor of
their productive powers, being the most fecund element of our white
population. If allowance be made for their natural increase from 1880 to
1890 the white race would show a decennial increase appreciably below
that of the blacks. If the Negro, then, is threatened with extinction,
the white race is in a still more pitiable plight.
The table on page 6 does indeed show plainly that the Negro does not
hold his own as a numerical factor of our mixed population. Whereas he
represented 19 per cent of the entire population in 1810 he now
represents only 12 per cent. But the cause of this relative decline is
apparent enough. It is due to white immigration and not to "race traits"
as Mr. Hoffman would have us believe. It would be as legitimate to
attribute the decline of the Yankee element as a numerical factor in the
large New England centers to the race degeneracy of the Puritan, while
ignoring the proper cause--the influx of the Celt.
Mr. Hoffman's conclusions as to the Negro population are not generally
accepted by students of social problems. Their position is more clearly
stated in a recent notice of the work now under review. "Concerning the
first of these chapters dealing with population he (Mr. Hoffman) reaches
conclusions very different from those generally held by those who have
discussed the subject on _a priori_ grounds. The general impression has
been that the colored population was increasing at a rate greater than
that of the whites, owing both to the greater number of children born
and also to the fact that all children of a mixed race were counted as
blacks. From such a condition of affairs it would naturally be assumed
that the race to which all half-breeds were credited would, especially
if prolific, rapidly gain upon the other race."[13]