that of all non-European elements only 15.12 per cent., it will be seen
that although the black increase is on a larger basis it hardly
justifies alarm over an imagined flood of overwhelming coloured numbers.

If the coloured increase is due chiefly to propagation among the
coloured people themselves then it forms a good argument against those
who assert that the half-caste is relatively inclined to sterility,
while if the increase is found to be due to cohabitation of white men
with coloured women then it is a fair illation that the coloured section
is in process of absorption by the whites. This assumed process of
absorption will, no doubt, entail the presence of a certain, even a
large, number of coloured people for many generations to come, but this
number will grow smaller, and not greater, as time goes on because there
is no reason to doubt that the white women of South Africa, as a whole,
will refrain in the future as they have refrained in the past from
cohabiting with black men, so that the observed tendency towards the
diffusion of the coloured element back into the parent streams will be
allowed to continue.

But let us for a moment look calmly, and as far as possible without
prejudice, at the people who in South Africa are said to furnish the
awful example of the alleged evil of the crossing of white and black.
The fact that the denunciation of these people is based on opposite and
contradictory arguments shows that it is not the result of clear
thinking. On the one side it is vehemently asserted that the coloured
man is a physiological misfit, a sort of hybrid unfit for the society
of either white or black and an alleged relative sterility of his kind
is advanced as proof of this assertion. On the other side it is said,
with equal vehemence, that the coloured people are mongrels, unfit to
mingle with the pure parental breeds, and that this is proved by their