We have already touched upon the subject of morality among colored women. Various causes, some of which we have noted, go to the making up of this high percentage of crime. The Negroes themselves believe the basic cause to be their recent enslavement with its attendant unstable marriage and parental status. They point to the centuries of healthful home relationships among Americans and Europeans, and contrast them with the thousands upon thousands of yearly sales of slaves that but two generations ago disrupted the Negro's attempts at family life. With this heritage they believe that it is inevitable that numbers of their women should be slow to recognize the sanctity of home and the importance of feminine virtue. The mortality figures for the New York Negro are more striking than the figures for crime. In 1908 the death rate for whites in the city was 16.6 in every thousand; for colored (including Chinese), 28.9, almost double the white rate. The Negroes' greatest excess over the white was in tuberculosis, congenital debility, and venereal diseases as the table on the following page shows. The Negro's inherent weakness, his inability to resist disease, is a favorite topic today with writers on the color question. A high mortality is indeed a matter for grave concern, but we may question whether these figures show inherent weakness. If a new disease attacks any group of people, it causes terrible decimation, and tuberculosis and venereal diseases, the white man's plagues, have proved terribly destructive to the black man. But recalling the conditions under which the great majority of the colored race lives in New York, the long hours of labor, the crowded rooms, the insufficient food, we find abundant cause for a high death rate. For poverty and death go hand in hand, and the proportion of Negroes in New York who, live in great poverty far exceeds the proportion of whites.[2]