ld have separate car laws where the Negro
constituted only 10 or 15 per cent of its total population. No state
would burden itself with the maintenance of two separate school systems
with a negro element of less than 10 per cent. Means of local separation
might be found, but there would be no expression of law on the subject.

Just as a heavy increase of Negro population makes for an increase of
friction, direct legislation, the protection of drastic social customs,
and a general feeling of unrest or uneasiness on the part of the white
population, so a decrease of such population, or a relatively small
increase as compared with the whites, makes for less friction, greater
racial tolerance, and a lessening of the feeling of necessity for
severely discriminating laws or customs. And this quite aside from the
fact of a difference of increase or decrease of actual points of
contact, varying with differences of numbers. The statement will
scarcely be questioned that the general attitude of the white race, as a
whole, toward the Negro would become much less uncompromising if we were
to discover that through two census periods the race had shown a
positive decrease in numbers. Racial antipathy would not decrease, but
the conditions which provoke its outward expression would undergo a
change for the better. There is a direct relation between the mollified
attitude of the people of the Pacific coast toward the Chinese
population and the fact that the Chinese population decreased between
1890 and 1900. There would in time be a difference of feeling toward the
Japanese now there if the immigration of more were prohibited by treaty
stipulation. There is the same immediate relation between the tolerant
attitude of whites toward the natives in the Hawaiian Islands and the
feeling that the native is a decadent and dying race. Aside from the
influence of the Indian's warlike qualities and of his refusal to submit
to slavery, the attitude and disposition of the white race toward him
have been influenced by considerations similar to those which today
operate in Hawaii. And the same influence has been a factor in
determining the attitude of the English toward the slowly dying Maoris
of New Zealand.

At no time in the history of the English-speaking people and at no place
of which we have any record where large numbers of them have been
brought into contact with an approximately equal number of Negroes have
the former granted to the latte