inhabitants, and one "coloured" for every 314 "coloured" inhabitants. I am not desirous of asking too much attention to this particular estimate, which is open to error, for the reason that, in the census reports, black and "coloured” people are classed together; but I feel bound to say that, upon showing this estimate to the superintendents of several convict establishments in the South, I have been invariably told that, whether exact or inexact, it might be accepted as expressive of the general truth. If, therefore, the products of miscegenation be short life and excessive tendency to disease and crime, is miscegenation, even supposing honourable and legal miscegenation to be possible, a desirable way out of the difficulty? I venture to think not. Honourable miscegenation, besides, is out of the question.

One other solution has been proposed. It is, however, too important and many-sided a scheme for me to deal with at the close of this already too lengthy chapter.

I HAVE attempted to show that the negro problem in the Southern States cannot be satisfactorily solved by the limitation of the suffrage, by the surrender of any portion of the country to the control of the black majority, by education of the coloured citizen, or by miscegenation of the races. The central point of the situation is the presence of the negro in the South. If he were not there, there would be no negro difficulty. The solution, therefore, that alone promises to be thoroughly effective is his removal. His mere dissemination throughout the Union would not be sufficient. No scheme of emigration from the South to the North and West can permanently benefit the negro or settle the race question. The "colour line" is, as has been repeatedly shown, even more clearly defined in the North than in the South. Everywhere in the South, for example, one may see black and white cab-drivers, though they do not love one another, plying indis

criminately for hire, black and white bricklayers working on the same buildings, black and white compositors setting up type at adjoining cases; but in most parts of the North things are different. There, with very few exceptions, the negro is not admitted to ordinary trade-union organisations; he is remorselessly "crowded out" from every occupation and employment; and his position is, upon the whole, worse than in Georgia or Louisiana. If the seven or eight millions of coloured people were to-morrow scattered equally over the States, the South, no doubt, would be relieved, but neither the North and West nor the negro would be better off. A more radical programme of removal must be adopted by any party that earnestly desires alike the welfare of the inferior stock and the final solution of the problem. There must be another exodus from Egypt, another restoration of the captive tribes.

In its bare outline the policy with which I am about to deal is not new. One of Thomas Jefferson's most prophetic utterances was :-"Nothing is more clearly written in the Book of Destiny than the emancipation of the blacks; and it is equally certain that the two races will never live in a state of equal freedom under the same Government, so insurmountable are the barriers

which nature, habit, and opinion have established between them."

Jefferson, who died nearly forty years before emancipation became an accomplished fact, did not omit to prepare, so far as lay in his power, for the evil which he saw approaching. With Henry Clay and others, he founded the African Colonisation Society, which established on the west coast of Africa the Negro Republic of Liberia, and, between 1820 and 1860, sent thither about 10,000 free coloured people. It may at once be admitted that the colony has not been a conspicuous success, for the American immigrants and their descendants now hardly number 5,000 souls, and, according to Mr. Charles H. J. Taylor, a late American Minister to the Republic, the place is to-day "a land of snakes, centipedes, fever, miasma, poverty, superstition, and death." But the comparative failure of the Liberia scheme is due, in my humble opinion, rather to the principles in accordance with which it was carried out than to any inherent and necessary unfitness of the negro for colonisation. for colonisation. I shall later point out what appears to me to be the weak points in the Constitution of Liberia, as well as in that of Hayti. If they lie where I suspect they do, it is only natural that Jefferson and his associates and successors should have overlooked them.

Nor were Jefferson and his friends the only ones who, early in the century, sought to fend off the looming negro difficulty. In 1825 Senator Rufus King, of New York, was so far-seeing as to introduce to the United States Senate a resolution declaring that "the whole public land of the United States, with the net proceeds of all future sales thereof, shall constitute and form a fund which is hereby appropriated; and the faith of the United States is hereby pledged that the said fund shall be inviolably applied to aid the emancipation of such slaves within any of the United States, and to aid the removal of such slaves and the removal of such free persons of colour in any of the United States, as by the laws of the States respectively shall be allowed to be emancipated, to any territory or country without the limits of the United States."

Senator King was far in advance of his day and generation, and, not unnaturally, his motion came to nothing; but it is very likely indeed that, had it been carried, there would at the present moment be no considerable number of negroes in North America. The sum of money which under his scheme would already have become available for the removal of the coloured people exceeds £50,000,000 sterling, exclusive of interest, and the lands still undisposed of are