Save in West Virginia, Florida, and the black belts the whites at the South increased more swiftly than the blacks. Certain of what Malthus called the "positive checks" upon population--viz., diseases, mainly syphilis, typhoid, and consumption--decimated the negroes everywhere. Colored population drifted from the country to cities, which probably accounted for the fact that in 1890 more negroes lived in the North than ever before. In the South itself, on the other hand, the movement of colored population was southward and westward, from the highlands to the lowlands, so that Kentucky, along with western Virginia, northeastern Mississippi, and rural parts of Maryland, North Alabama, and eastern Virginia, had, in 1890, fewer colored inhabitants than ten years previous. These confusing data explain why few were rash enough to prophesy the fate of the American negro. Such predictions as were heard, were, in the main, little hopeful. Colonization abroad was no resource. In 1895 the International Immigration Society shipped 300 negroes to Liberia, and in 1897 the Central Labor Union of New York 311 more, but no movement of the kind could be set going. In fact, the one certainty touching the American negroes' future was that they would remain in the United States. From 1870 to 1880 the percentage of negroes to the total population had increased, but a century had reduced this ratio from 19.3 per cent. to 12 per cent. The climatic area where black men had any advantage over white in the struggle for life was less than eight per cent. of the country. White laborers competed more and more sharply. The paternal affection of the old slave-holding generation toward negroes was not inherited by the makers of the New South. There was one hopeful force at work--Booker Washington at Tuskegee, in the very heart of the Alabama black belt. His personality, his example, his ideas were inspiring. He bade his race to expect improvement in its condition not from any political party nor from Northern benevolence, but from its own advance in industry and character. His great and successful college at Tuskegee, with an enrolment of 1,231 students in 1889, gave much impetus to industrial education among the blacks, turning in that direction educational interest and energy which had previously found vent to too great an extent, relatively, in providing negro students with mere literary training. The Slater-Armstrong Memorial Trades' Building, dedicated January 10, 1890, was erected and finished by the students practically alone. At least three-fourths of those receiving instruction at this school pursued, after leaving, the industries learned there.