must
surmount are so very peculiar and so very much greater than that of
other peoples we must do our best to, at once, recognize the fact and
begin the work. I believe the goal is ours and if we will only
struggle manfully and hopefully onward we will soon reach it. With

_EDUCATION AND MONEY_

as the remedy, the colored people must be taught that the first step
towards the reduction of disease is to begin at the beginning, to
provide for the health of the unborn. The error, commonly entertained,
that marriageable men and women have nothing to consider except money,
station, or social relationships demands correction.

The offspring of marriage, the most precious of all fortunes, deserves
surely as much forethought as is bestowed upon the offspring of the
lower animals.

It is well that we teach, in the school room and from the pulpit,
about the condition that exists in the parental line, maternal and
paternal. The necessity for such instruction is somewhat indicated, in
the effect upon the prenatal state, of such conditions as scrofula or
struma, of various forms of tuberculosis and syphilis, of epilepsy, of
rheumatism, and of insanity. These are only a few. We have to contend
even with hereditary proclivity to some forms of the acute
communicable diseases, such as diphtheria and scarlet fever and also
to immunity from the same.

We must furnish, by all available means and through every possible
channel of information, persistent and systematic instruction in
public, home and personal hygiene. We should utilize especially the
power of the pulpit and influence the public school authorities to
institute, in the colored schools throughout the South, special
instruction on these subjects. The importance of such instruction is
evident in the agitation which is now occurring among the educators in
the schools of the Eastern states. If it is needed there then the need
of it in the colored schools of the South must be urgent indeed.

We must give such education as will tend to a better general
knowledge, especially of the two diseases which, I believe, more than
any, should be the most dreaded as being the most prolific of injury
to mankind and especially to the colored people on account of their
ignorance of the communicability of disease combined with their
poverty. I refer to the contagious maladies tuberculosis and the one
called "specific" or syphilis, the moral as well as the physical blot
on all civilized lif