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“ You think the coloured people are moving from Kentucky and Virginia into South Carolina?”
“Not a doubt of it,” says a journalist of whom we seek an answer.
“Always on the road, in my vocation, I see the files and squads, full-blood, mulattoes, and quadroons, all creeping from the North.
Sickness thins the number; for the darkies are rotten sheep, and perish on the road.
More die than reach our soil.”
What are the facts?
Are South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, chiefly South Carolina, taking in the whole drain from Missouri and Kentucky, Maryland and Virginia?
Or, beyond the change implied by exodus, is there a great margin of displacement, telling of decay?
Two tests may be employed.
Is the African family on the whole increasing in America?
Are the members of this family better lodged and fed?
Opinions differ as to whether the Africans are increasing in America.
The rate of increase has assuredly fallen off. Nobody fancies they are multiplying like the Europeans in America.
Every statist owns that they are not growing under freedom as they grew under servitude.
Nor is there much
1875.
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