streets and
alleys that traverse Negro settlements. In almost every town in the
South there are settlements, known by such names as "New Africa,"
"Haiti," "Log Town," "Smoky Hollow," or "Snow Hill," exclusively
inhabited by Negroes. These settlements are often outside the corporate
limits. The houses are built along narrow, crooked, and dirty lanes,
and the community is without sanitary regulations or oversight. These
quarters should be brought under municipal control, the lanes widened
into streets and cleaned, and provision made to guard against the
opening of similar ones in the future.

In the next place, property-owners should build better houses for the
Negroes to live in. The weakness in the civilization of the Negroes is
most pronounced in their family life. But improvement in this respect is
not possible without an improvement in the character and the comforts
of the houses they live in. Bad houses breed bad people and bad
neighborhoods. There is no more distinctive form of crime than the
building and renting of houses unfit for human habitation.

Scarcely second in importance to improvements in house architecture
is the need among Negroes of more time to spend with their families.
Employers of Negro labor should be less exacting in the number of hours
required for a day's work. Many domestic servants now work from six in
the morning until nine and ten o'clock at night. The Southern habit
of keeping open shopping-places until late at night encourages late
suppers, retains cooks, butlers, and nurses until bedtime, and robs
them of all home life. If the merchants would close their shops at six
o'clock, as is the custom in the North, the welfare of both races would
be greatly promoted.

Again, a revolution is needed in the character of the Negro's religion.
At present it is too largely an affair of the emotions. He needs to
be taught that the religious life is something to grow into by the
perfection of personality, and not to be jumped into or sweated into
at camp-meetings. The theological seminaries and the graduate preachers
should assume the task of grafting upon the religion of the Negro that
much sanity at least.

A reform is as much needed in the methods and aims of Negro education.
Up to the present Negro education has shared with that of the white man
the fault of being top-heavy. Colleges and universities have developed
out of proportion to, and at the expense of, common schools. Then,
the kind of