| No. 1.—A Review of Hoffman’s Race Traits andTendencies of the American Negro.—Kelly Miller | 25 Cts. | |
| No. 2.—The Conservation of Races.—W. E.Burghardt DuBois | 15 Cts. |
Orders may be sent to John H. Wills, 506 Eleventh Street N. W., Washington, D. C.
In August, 1896, there was published, under the auspices of the AmericanEconomic Association, a work entitled “Race Traits and Tendencies of theAmerican Negro,” by Frederick L. Hoffman, F. S. S., statistician to thePrudential Insurance Company of America. This work presents by far themost thorough and comprehensive treatment of the Negro problem, from astatistical standpoint, which has yet appeared. In fact, it may beregarded as the most important utterance on the subject since thepublication of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin;” for the interest which the famousnovel aroused in the domain of sentiment and generous feelings, thepresent work seems destined to awaken in the field of science and exactinquiry.
Mr. Hoffman has spent ten years in painful and laborious investigationof the subject, during which time he has been in touch with the fullestsources of information, and has had the advice and assistance of thehighest living authorities in statistics and social science. The temperof mind which he brought to this study may be judged from his own words:“Being of foreign birth, a German, I was fortunately free from apersonal bias which might have made an impartial treatment of thesubject difficult.”[1] There are other assurances that the authorpossesses no personal animosity or repugnance against the Negro as such.But, freedom from conscious personal bias does not relieve the authorfrom the imputation of partiality to his own opinions beyond the warrantof the facts which he has presented. Indeed, it would seem that hisconclusion was reached from a priori considerations and that factshave been collected in order to justify it.
[Pg 4]The main conclusion of the work is that the Negro race in America isdeteriorating physically and morally in such manner as to point toulterior extinction, and that this decline is due to “race traits”rather than to conditions and circumstances of life. Not only do we findthis conclusion expressly set forth in connection with every chapter,but it is also easily discernible in foot notes and quotations, in thegeneral drift of cited references, and between the lines. In order togive the clearest possible statement of the author’s position his ownwords will be used.
“The conditions of life therefore ... would seem to be of lessimportance than race and heredity.”[2]
“It is not the conditions of life but in the race traits andtendencies that we find the causes of the