===================================================== New York, 1908. | White. | Colored. ----------------------------------+--------+--------- Number of deaths from all causes | | per 1000 population | 16.6 | 28.9 Number of deaths per 1000 deaths: | | Tuberculosis | 136. | 232.8 Pneumonia | 126. | 136.3 Diarrhoea and enteritis | 91.8 | 79. Bright's disease | 78.3 | 56.5 Heart disease | 76.7 | 83.4 Cancer | 45.5 | 24.8 Congenital debility | 24.5 | 34.1 Diphtheria and croup | 23.7 | 15. Scarlet fever | 19. | 3.2 Typhoid | 7.3 | 6.9 Venereal diseases | 4. | 13.4 All others | 367.2 | 314.6 +--------+--------- | 1000.0 | 1000.0 ===================================================== The students at Hampton Institute sing an old plantation song that runs like this: "If religion was a thing that money could buy, The rich would live and the poor would die. But my good Lord has fixed it so The rich and the poor together must go." Some of our rich men seem to have fixed it with religion to escape from the condition the poem describes, but it depicts a reality in the Negro's life. Rich and poor, as we saw when we left our old New Yorkers, competent and inefficient, pure and diseased, good and bad, all go together. Much of the recent literature written by Negroes, and especially that by Dr. Booker T. Washington, attempts to separate in the minds of the community the thrifty and prosperous colored men from the helpless and degraded; but the effort meets with a limited success. When we can have a statistical study of some thousands of the well-to-do Negroes compared with an equal number of well-to-do whites, we may find striking similarity. From my own observations I find that the well-to-do Negroes bear and rear children, refrain from committing crimes that put them into jail, and live to an old age with the same success as their white neighbors. But they get little credit for it. Willy-nilly, the strong, intellectual Negro is linked to his unfortunate fellow. Whether an increase in material prosperity will break this bond, or whether it will continue until it ceases to be a bond as humanity comes into its own, is a secret of the future. For today the song rings true, and the rich and the poor go together. FOOTNOTES: [1] Quincy Ewing, "The Heart of the Race Problem," _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1909.