“The police department of Mobile, Ala., has established a curfew law for Negroes. Commencing on the night of July 21, the law provides that all Negroes must be in bed at their homes by ten o’clock or be subject to arrest. Any caught wandering at large after that hour will be locked up. This action is taken because there is said to be an epidemic of hold-ups perpetrated by the Negroes. If such a law was enforced in Baltimore it would decrease the alley fights ninety-five per cent.” NEGRO IMMORALITY In connection with Negro criminality it seems pertinent to say something of Negro immorality. Two of the Negro’s most prominent characteristics are the utter lack of chastity and complete ignorance of veracity. The Negro’s sexual laxity, considered so immoral or even criminal in the white man’s civilization, may have been all but a virtue in the habitat of his origin. There nature developed in him intense sexual passions to offset his high death rate. Then, too, the economic influences which fostered a family life among other peoples were mostly lacking in tropical Africa as nature provided abundantly without effort on the part of man. Although the regulations adopted by masters for the control of the Negroes during slavery times may have served as a check upon their natural sexual propensities, however, since emancipation they have been under no such restraint and as a consequence they have possibly almost reverted to what must have been their primitive promiscuity. Huffman says that in 1894 more than one-fourth of the colored births in the city of Washington were illegitimate. Many prominent Negroes admit that above ninety per cent of both sexes are unchaste. A negro may be a pillar in the church and at the same time the father of a dozen illegitimate children by as many mothers. Another Negro failing is lying. One can believe neither layman nor minister, neither criminal nor saint among them. One may occasionally find a truthful Negro,—just as he may find a virtuous or an honest one. Undoubtedly both honest and truthful was the Negro,—an elder in the church,—who refused to partake of the Lord’s Supper, because, as he said, the flour the bread was made of had been stolen. Some benevolently-inclined men and many religious zealots thought that religion and education was the “Open Sesame” by means of which the “salvation” of the Negro was to come. So they sent him money to build churches and to found great schools. Many, however, are now finding that though the Negro may have religion he has no morality; and that too often his education makes him unwilling to do what he can do and wish to do that for which he is unfitted or for which there is no demand. At present who can tell whether he is going forward or backward. Some one has said that there is going on side by side in the Negro people a minimum of progress with a maximum of regress.