gs to that class of quiet, earnest souls who
pursue the "even tenor of their way" and are doing most to
establish truth, to refute error, content to let the "deeds,
though mute, speak loud the doer."

The American Negro finds himself, at the beginning of the twentieth
century, seriously embarrassed by the many false and damaging
accusations that have been made against him, not least of which is the
charge of physical inferiority. The charge has been wholesale that the
Negro differs from the white man physically, and that he is ethnically
and strongly predisposed to certain fatal and contagious diseases.
This stigma of disease has been placed upon him and repeatedly
emphasized, but despite the fact that the effort has been made for
years, by men learned in anthropology to find and prove the inherent
inferiority of the Negro, based upon anatomical, physiological and
biostatic peculiarity, to-day the bare statistical fact of his high
mortality alone supports the calumnious fabrication. It is true that
according to official statistics the Negro's death rate in this
country is relatively high, but the causes of disparity are
_extrinsic_ and _remedial_ and he was not stamped thus _ab initio_,
but by the fiat of the Creative-will.

The Negro, identified as he is with the great human family, is subject
to the same deteriorating influences that affect his fellow-man. Hence
impure air and water, polluted soil from defective sewerage,
adulterated food-stuffs, and the unhealthful conditions imposed during
the school-going period of life--which are questions of public hygiene
and general concern--contribute, in no small degree, to his mortality.
But aside from these influences, common to all people, he is subject
to others peculiar to himself, on account of the environments that
govern him. The proverbial unreliability of statistics justifies the
assumption that the Negro's death-rate is not as great as it is said
to be. The occupations of the Negro tend to keep him in the
back-ground and to encourage a neglect on the part of the census
enumerator to record accurately all of the Negroes in a certain
locality. But the Negro dies faster than the white man, and it is not
my purpose to deny it, but to recite a few of the real causes of the
disparity in the cities of the South, and to show how that mortality
is to be lessened.

(1) American slavery, with its unparalleled cruelty and bestiality has
injured the Negro, in