st-like_, stands forbidding the ventilation and cleaning of homes;
it says: "It's too cold to bathe;" it sends men and women to bed in
wet and damp clothes and does many other acts that multiply the graves
in the old church-yard on the hill.

We come now to consider _poverty_. Oh, what an enemy it is, and has
been, to the human family! It makes its home mostly among the
ignorant, and especially among the masses. In the cities of the South
the great masses are colored people. Hence it is among these that
poverty sits enthroned--a sceptered king ruling amid disease and
death. It retards the masses of the race in their march to the city of
improvement; it prevents them from having larger and cleaner and
better homes; with its bony fingers it points them to the cheap
renting huts in alleys, dens, dives and basements of cities, and
commands them to enter and die; it follows them into the market places
and fills their baskets with cheap adulterated and semi-decayed
food-stuffs; aided by prejudice and man's inhumanity to man, it drives
the colored people from the healthy country districts into the
crowded, sickly settlements of the Southern cities, where they soon
sicken and die.

Poverty, supplemented by ignorance, and the want of the true Christian
spirit, stands in the doorways of the public hospitals, infirmaries
and libraries where aids to health are to be found and forbids these
people to enter either on account of their color or the "want of
space." Poverty keeps these people from building such institutions for
themselves.

Again, the colored people of Southern cities constitute the great
labor force, hence most of the diseases that result from exposure are
more prevalent among them than they are among the white race.

Those diseases that result from improper foods, poor sanitation, want
of pure air, need of better homes and want of public parks and baths,
together with those untimely deaths due to the want of proper medical
attention, good nursing and surgical operations at the right time are
more extensive among the colored masses because they are the ones
that suffer the privations mentioned to a greater extent than any
other people.

Along with the observations already mentioned on this subject, and
which observations have led me to reach the conclusion that "the want
of money" is at the base of this excessive mortality, is this
encouraging fact--that the colored people are not dying now as fast as
they were