-the increase of the negro and half-breed populations has been
everywhere one of the startling results of emancipation. The
general belief among the creole whites of the Lesser Antilles
would seem to confirm the old prediction that the slave races of
the past must become the masters of the future. Here and there
the struggle may be greatly prolonged, but everywhere the
ultimate result must be the same, unless the present conditions
of commerce and production become marvellously changed. The
exterminated Indian peoples of the Antilles have already been
replaced by populations equally fitted to cope with the forces of
the nature about them,--that splendid and terrible Nature of the
tropics which consumes the energies of the races of the North,
which devours all that has been accomplished by their heroism or
their crimes,--effacing their cities, rejecting their
civilization. To those peoples physiologically in harmony with
this Nature belong all the chances of victory in the contest--
already begun--for racial supremacy.

But with the disappearance of the white populations the ethnical
problem would be still unsettled. Between the black and mixed
peoples prevail hatreds more enduring and more intense than any
race prejudices between whites and freedmen in the past;--a new
struggle for supremacy could not fail to begin, with the
perpetual augmentation of numbers, the ever-increasing
competition for existence. And the true black element, more
numerically powerful, more fertile, more cunning, better adapted
to pyrogenic climate and tropical environment, would surely win.
All these mixed races, all these beautiful fruit-colored
populations, seem doomed to extinction: the future tendency must
be to universal blackness, if existing conditions continue--