Although all these sources of friction have led the Indian to feel unjustly treated, it is still true that there has been scarcely any actually destructive oppression. The very races which have been influenced most by American culture have developed favourably. Last year the Indian mortality was 4,728, and the number of births 4,742; the Indians are, therefore, not dying out. The largest community is in the so-called Indian Territory and consists of 86,000 people, while there are 42,000 in Arizona. The several Indian reservations together embrace 117,420 square miles.
The Indian question is the least serious problem of all those which concern population in America; by far the most difficult is the negro question. The Indian lives within certain reservations, but the negro lives everywhere side by side with the American. So also the Indian troubles are narrowly confined to a small reservation in the great field of American problems, but the negro question is met everywhere in American thought, and in connection with every American interest. There could hardly be a greater contrast than that between the Indian and the negro; the former is proud, self-contained, selfish and revengeful, passionate and courageous, keen and inventive. The negro, on the other hand, is subservient, yielding, almost childishly good natured, lazy and sensual, without energy or ambition, outwardly apt to learn, but without any spirit of invention or intellectual independence. And still one ought not to speak of these millions of people as if they were of one type. On the Gulf of Mexico there are regions where the black population lives almost wholly sunk in the superstitions of its African home; while in Harvard University a young negro student has written creditable essays on Kant and Hegel. And between these opposite poles exists a population of about nine millions.
The negro population of America does not increase quite so rapidly as the white, and yet in forty years it has increased two-fold. In the year 1860, before the slaves were freed, there were 4,441,000 blacks; in 1870, 4,880,000; in 1880, 6,580,000; in 1890, 7,470,000; in 1900, 8,803,000. In view of this considerable increase of the negro, it is not to be expected that the problem will lose anything of its urgency by the more rapid growth of the white population. And at the same time the physical contrast between the races is in no wise decreasing, because there is no mixing of the white and black races to-day, as there very frequently was before the war. It will not be long before the coloured population will be twice the entire population which Canada to-day has. These people are distributed geographically, so that much the largest part lives in those states which before the war practised slavery. To be sure, an appreciable part has wandered into the northern states, and the poorer quarters of the large cities are well infiltrated with blacks. Four-fifths, however, still remain in the South, owing probably to climatic conditions; the negro race thrives better in a warm climate. But it belongs there economically also, and has nearly every reason for staying there in future.