ancipation. 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