se uninhabitable quarters
and the quality of the food taken by those who live in these
disgraceful dwellings must be looked after.

Habits of living must be corrected and a crusade against ignorance and
vice begun by society. I don't think I would miss it very far when I
say that one-third of the colored people in our cities live in just
such dwellings as I have described here; while most of the white
population live in well-built houses in the healthy portions of the
cities. Is there any surprise that there should be so great a
disproportion in the mortality of the races? Compare the statistics of
all the large cities and you will find that under similar conditions,
this same proportion in mortality exists in the Northern and foreign
cities, where the food and dwelling of the poor have the same
difference. But this same difference exists nowhere in the world as it
does in the South. It is almost impossible for a colored man to rent a
respectable house anywhere in the cities; but the dark, low, damp,
confined, ill-ventilated cellars and alley houses are rented for as
much as comfortable quarters ought to bring. I don't wonder that the
mortality of the Negro is so great; but I do wonder that it is not
greater. Any other race of people would have been exterminated in
twenty years.

The remedy for the high death-rate is the enactment, and enforcement
of laws against allowing the people to sleep in basements, cellars,
old stables, alley houses, in low malarial sections of the cities, and
making the penalty against the landlords so great, that they will not
rent such places for dwellings. Regulate the kind of tenement houses
and the number of persons who shall sleep in one room, the kind of
food and rules for its preparation; break up these late church
meetings in poorly ventilated houses, and the problem will be solved.

The infant mortality will be reduced one-half when our people learn
that the care of a good conscientious physician is necessary, from
generation to development, and through the entire stage of
adolescence; not so much to cure, as to prevent disease. Our whole
system of medicine is now turning upon prevention rather than cure.
When the public is educated up to the point of paying physicians to
prevent as well as cure diseases, then, there will be less sickness
and fewer epidemics.

Then sanitary science, under the strict observance of hygiene, will
reach perfection; the rude, gross habits of living wil