quiet, and expect nothing great from the toil of hand or thought. Knowing something of the limitations and very little of the capabilities of our moral nature, it is perhaps natural we should shrink from the prospect that the classes which have been the depositary of refinement and breeding will be submerged below the level of democracy, that distinctions of rank and fortune, of character and intellect, will become unimportant, that the family with its consecrated memories and duties will be transformed into a genial partnership of independent wills, that fancy and imagination will find no expression in literature, and that the faiths for which men have lived and died in times past will only survive as topics of meditation or as the discipline of ethical practice. When the gods of Greece passed away with the great Pan, nature lost its divinity, but society was overshadowed by a holier presence. When Christianity itself began to appear grotesque and incredible, men reconciled themselves to the change by belief in an age of reason, of enlightenment, of progress. It is now more than probable that our science, our civilisation, our great and real advance in the practice of government are only bringing us nearer to the day when the lower races will predominate in the world, when the higher races will lose their noblest elements, when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor from the future but that we may not deteriorate. Even so, there will still remain to us ourselves. Simply to do our work in life, and to abide the issue, if we stand erect before the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training for our souls than the faith in progress.

Of these numbers, taken merely from the Statesman's YearBook, it may be observed

1. That the number of pure whites allotted to Brazil seems extravagantly large. It probably includes all half-castes, except mulattoes.

2. In Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and British Honduras, the number of whites is given conjecturally, or by collection, from all estimates. The estimate of whites

for Colombia is taken from Lanier's Amérique du Sud, p. 372.

3. The last census of Venezuela shows a decisive increase of half-castes and diminution of pure Indians. Former censuses give the numbers as follows:

We must take into account in considering Venezuela—(1) that in 1881 there were 34,916 foreign residents of white extraction; (2) that a great many wild Indians have been civilised after a fashion during the last half-century; and (3) that half-castes are bound to increase disproportionately, other things being equal.

4. If the numbers given above are approximately correct, the coloured races, pure and mixed, are as 28,000,000 or 29,000,000 to 8,000,000 or 9,000,000 of whites, or practically white. If, however, the whites are over-calculated for Brazil, as seems certain, the proportion of the coloured to the white races in these regions is probably as four to one. What are the chances that the white races will be reinforced by immigration so as to preserve its present ratio? and, if it is not so reinforced, must it not gradually be absorbed? Putting the Indians out of the question, the negroes alone, though now inferior in numbers to the whites, would easily increase in a century so as to swamp them if the two races multiply in the same proportions as the whites and coloured people of the Black Belt in the United States. It is not at present likely that the negroes will absorb Colombia, Venezuela, or Peru. It seems at least very possible that they will make Brazil practically a negro state with an influential white minority.

5. In the preceding calculation the negroes of the Black Belt in the United States have not been taken into account. It is obvious, however, that from 8,000,000 to 9,000,000 blacks, increasing at a rapid rate, and settling by preference in the warmer climates, are likely at no very distant time to reinforce the coloured population of Central and Southern

America.

They may contribute a yearly tide of immigrants by sea, simply because they want more space, or the legislation of the United States may be so framed as to dispose them to settle elsewhere. Central America at present would appear to offer them more inducements than Africa.1

1 Bryce says of Mexico: "The population was in 1884, 10,460,703, of whom 20 per cent are stated to be pure whites, 43 per cent of mixed races, and the remaining 37 per cent Indians."-American Commonwealth, vol. iii. p. 260, note.