As late as 1860 there were only a little more than 226,000 negroes in the North out of more than 4,440,000 in the whole country. Of rather more than 750,000 colored persons enumerated in that census by far the larger part were in the Southern States. The first census, that of 1790, showed a population of nearly 4,000,000, almost equally divided between the North and South. Much of this growth came from natural increase, especially in the South, where a considerable part of the gain from immigration must be set down to the importation of African slaves. By 1700, it is believed to have grown to 1,850,000, in which latter estimate are probably included about 100,000 whites in the Canadas. The total population of the British North American mainland in 1688, it is estimated, was 200,000. They are an English people of the Midi in the making. It is fair to say then that only a small part of the whites in Australia are a people dwelling for more than two generations under semi-tropical conditions. The whites in Australia present the nearest parallel in this regard to our own Southern whites, but the white population of Australia has been considerable for only two generations, and large for hardly more than fifty years and much of the increase up to very recent times came from immigration. Not elsewhere the world over have Englishmen dwelt continuously in large numbers under semi-tropical conditions for so much as three generations. They are essentially a people of what the French call the Midi, and these interrelated facts of race and residence have been too little considered in the examination of their history and the prognostication of their future. OUR Southern whites present the only instance in the history of the world of a people mainly English by blood and tradition, who have dwelt continuously for six or eight generations below the 39th parallel.
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