Southern standard. (McMinnville, Tenn.) 1879-current, 1888-12-29
AN ETHNIcAL PROBLEM.
6peoulations Concerning the Future Race
of the West ladies.


Spec ulations Concerning the Future Race
Of the West ladies.
TheI all the long succession of inn
pressions received fantastic, sensuous,
exotic, unfamiliar-begin to group, to
blend, to form homogeneous results,
ideas, beliefs, Strongest among these
is the conviction that the white race is
disappearing from these islands, ac-
quired and held so long. at so vast q
cost OF blood and treasure. Reasons
almost beyond enumerations have been
advanced-economical, climatic, eth
meal, political-all OF which contain
truth, yet no single one of which can
wholly explain the fact. Already the
white West Indian populations are di-
minishing at rate that almost stag
gers credibility. In the island para
disc of Martinique in 1S4S there were
$4,000 whites; now, against 100000
blacks and half-breeds, there are less
than 5000 creoles left to maintain
the ethnie struggle, and the num-
Der of the latter is annual
ly growing less. Many of the British
islands have been almost deserted by
their former cultivators: ST. Vincent
is becoming desolate Tobago is ruin;
St, Martin lies half abandoned; st.
Christopher is crumbling; Grenada has
lost more than half her whites; st.
Thomas, once the most prosperous, the
most prolific, the most cosmopolitan
of West Indian ports, is in full deca-
dence. Perhaps in Trinidad. where i'm
mense English capital has been invest
ed, and where the coolie population is
intelligent and powerful enough to sup
plant and master the African, the
struggle will be greatly prolonged, and
the result less dismal; but elsewhere
the slave races OF the past seem
destined to become, sooner or later,
the masters of the future; and the ex-
terminated Indian people OF the An
titles will eventually be replaced by
populations similarly fitted to cope
with climatic conditions. in perfect
| physiological harmony with this trop-
ical nature-viOlent, terrible, splendid
which mocks the will and consumes
the energies OF the races of the North,
which swallows up the grandest re-
suits of their labors, which devours
all that has been accomplished by
their heroisms or their crimes, obliter-
ating their cities, rejecting their civ
| ilization.
But with the disappearance of the
white populations the clinical problem
would be still unsolved. Between the
black and mixed peoples rage hatreds
far more enduring and more intense
than any race prejudices between mas
tiers and freedmen in the past; new
struggle for supremacy could not fail
to begin, with the perpetual augmenta-
ton of numbers, the ever-incrcasing
competition for existence. And the
true black element, more numerically
powerful, more fertile. more cunning,
better adapted to the conditions OF
pyrogenic climate and tropical
environment, would surely win the
e. contest. All these mixed races, all
these beautiful fruit-colorcd popula-
tons, seem doomed to eXtiuction; the
future tendency must be to universal
blackness, if existing conditions con-
perhaps to universal savagery.
Everywhere the sins of the past have
borne the same fruit, have furnished
the colonies with social enigmas that
mock the wisdom of all humane legis-
lators, a dragon-crop of problems that
no modern political science has yet
proved competent to deal with. Can
it even be hoped that future sociolo-
gists will be able to answer them,
after Nature-who never forgives-
shall have enacted the utmost pos
sible retribution for all the errors and
follies of three hunded ears?-LJca-
1iO HrUrn IN HdrDpr'S MnonzfUe