There are certain noticeable irregularities in this table, due in part to known disturbing causes, and in part to imperfections in census methods. It is thus seen that the Negro constitutes a rapidly increasing element, though a slowly diminishing minority of the total population. This relative diminution is due wholly to the influx of white immigrants, more than 14,000,000 of whom have come to our shores since 1860. If the two races should continue to grow at the same relative rate of increase as during the last decade, according to the law of diminishing ratios, it would require more than one hundred years to reduce the Negro to one-tenth of the total population. So far as any practical calculation is concerned, we may regard this as an irreducible minimum. So long as the Negro constitutes one-tenth of the entire body of the American people we may expect to have the race problem, both in its general and in its political features. From the foundation of our government the Negro has constituted a serious political problem, mainly because of his unequal geographical distribution. If agricultural and economic conditions had been uniform, and the slaves had been evenly scattered over the whole area, the political phase of the race problem would have been far different from what it is and has been throughout our national life. The fact that the bulk of this race has been congested in one section has constituted the cause of political friction from the foundation of the Constitution till the present hour. This population persists in remaining in that section where it was most thickly planted by the institution of slavery. The center of gravity is still moving slowly towards the gulf of Mexico. Ninety-two per cent of the race is still found in the sixteen states where slavery prevailed at the outbreak of the civil war. The coastal states, from Maryland to Texas, contain three-fourths of the total number. While there has been a steady stream of Negro immigration towards the North and West, yet it has not been sufficient to materially affect the mass tendency. It would seem, on first view, that the Negro who complains so bitterly against political restrictions in the South would rush to the freer conditions of the North as a gas from a denser to a rarer medium. But political and civil freedom offered by the North are more than off-set by industrial restrictions and by the inertia of a population devoid of the pioneer spirit. The warm blooded, warm hearted child of the tropics is chilled alike by the rigid climate and frigid social atmosphere that prevail in the higher latitudes. In all New England there are fewer Negroes than are to be found in a single county in Tennessee.