its maximum. In the Northern states this raison d’etre wholly disappears. There is nothing, aside from a few kinds of personal service, which the Negro can do which the white man cannot do as well or perhaps better.”[30]

In the North the Negro race lives in industrial and social captivity; not being in sufficient numbers to form an independent constituency, they whine and pine over certain abstract principles of equality and brotherhood, but which, alas, fade into impalpable air under the application of a concrete test. They sit in the shadow of the tree of liberty and boast of its protecting boughs, but must not aspire to partake of the fruit thereof. The undershrubbery purchases shade and protection at too dear a price when it sacrifices therefor the opportunity of the glorious sunlight of heaven. No healthy, vigorous breed can be produced in the shade. No wonder, then, that the productive sensitiveness of the Northern Negro is affected by his industrial and social isolation among an overshadowing people who regard him with a feeling composed in equal parts of pity and contempt.

Consumption among Negroes.

The author enters into the causes of mortality and points out that in addition to infant mortality, which has already been noticed, consumption, pneumonia, and vicious taints of blood are the most alarming ones. With gloomy forebodings we are reminded that: “Its (the Negro race) extreme liability to consumption alone would suffice to seal its fate as a race.”[31]

The following citation will express the truth of the situation as clearly as it is possible to do: “From close personal observation, embracing a professional life of nearly forty years among the Negroes and from data obtained from professional brethren in different sections of the South, I have no hesitancy in declaring that insanity and tuberculosis were rare diseases among the Negroes of the South prior to emancipation. Indeed, many intelligent people of observation and full acquaintance of the Negro have stated to me that they never saw a crazy or consumptive Negro of unmixed blood until these latter years. The fact of their comparative exemption from these ailments prior to emancipation is so well established...”[32]

“Man is an organized being, and is subject to certain laws which he cannot violate with impunity. These laws affect him in the air he breathes, the food he eats, the clothes he wears, and (in) every circumstance surrounding his habilitation. In the wholesale violation of these laws after the war, as previously stated, was laid the foundation of the degeneration of the physical and mental condition of the Negro. Licentiousness left its slimy trail of sometimes ineradicable disease upon his physical being, and neglected bronchitis, pneumonia, and pleurisy lent their helping hand toward lung degeneration.”[33]

It will be noticed that Dr. Miller accepts all the facts alleged by our author, but places the causes squarely upon the ground of conditions, habits and circumstances of life. He does not seem to be acquainted with Mr. Hoffman’s discovery of “race traits.” The fact that under the hygienic and dietary regime of slavery, consumption was comparatively unknown among Negroes, but that under the altered conditions of emancipation it has developed to a threatening degree, would persuade any except the man with a theory, that the cause is due to the radical changes in life which freedom imposed upon the blacks, rather than to some malignant, capricious “race trait” which is not amenable to the law of cause and effect, but which graciously suspended its operation for two hundred years, and has now mysteriously selected the closing decades of the nineteenth century in which to make a trial of its direful power.

No people who work all day in the open air of a mild climate and who sleep at night in huts and cabins where crack and crevice and skylight admit abundant ventilation, will be subject to pulmonary weakness. Now take the same people and transplant them to the large cities of a colder climate, subject them to pursuits which do not call for a high degree of bodily energy, crowd them into alley tenements where the windows are used only for ornament and to keep out the “night air,” and a single door must serve for entrance, exit, and ventilation, and lung degeneration is the inevitable result. The cause of the evil suggests the remedy. The author in a previous chapter points out the threatening evil of crowding into the cities; a counter movement which would cause a return to the country, or would at least stay the mad urban movement, would not only improve the economic status of the race but would also benefit its physical and moral health. Here is an open field for practical philanthropy and wise Negro leadership.

The increase in consumption among Negroes is indeed a grave matter, but it is possible to exaggerate its importance as sociological evidence. If we listen to the alarmists and social agitators, we would find a hundred causes, each of which would destroy the human race in a single generation. The most encouraging evidence on this subject from the Negro’s point of view is afforded by the last report of the Surgeon General of the United States Army. The statistics thus furnished are the most valuable for comparative study, since they deal with the two races on terms of equality, that is, the white and colored men are of about the same ages and initial condition of health, they receive the same treatment and are subject to the same diet, work, and social habits. “It is to be noted, also,” says the Surgeon General, “that during the past two years the rates for consumption among the colored troops have fallen so as to be much lower than those for the whites, whereas formerly they were much higher.”[34]

The following table prepared by Mr. Hershaw, shows plainly the gradual decrease of the death rate from consumption in Southern cities for the past fifteen years.

Death rate per 1000 among Negroes from Consumption.[35]