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 excessive fecundity.  The coloured people are also accused of being inferior in physical constitution when compared with either of the parent races, and therefore undesirable.

My own observations, corroborated by the opinions of many other observers, leads me to believe that the fecundity of the coloured people is neither greater nor less than that of other people—­white, black or yellow—­whose birthrate is not artificially restricted, and that their general physical constitution, when not undermined by disease or stunted by underfeeding, is as strong as that of any other human variety.  The great naturalist, Wallace, has insisted that some degree of difference favours fertility, but that a little more tends to infertility, and by applying this hypothesis to the facts as I have observed them I am led to believe that there is no biological difference between the Bantu and the European of a degree sufficient to produce any difference, one way or the other, in the fertility of the offspring of the two races, but proper statistics, continued over several generations, will, of course, be required to prove or disprove this conclusion.