This is frequently the source of even pulmonary consumption, which disease i to-day the black man's scourge. According to Hoffman, over 25 per cent of the negro children born in Washingt City are admittedly illegitimate. According to a writer quoted in Black Ameria "in one county of Mississippi there were during twelve months 300 marraz licenses taken out in the county clerk's office for white people. According to t proportion of population there should have been in the same time 1,200 or more fer negroes. There were actually taken out by colored people just 3." James Anthias Froude asserts that 70 per cent of the negroes in the West Indies are born in is gitimacy. Mr. Smeeton claims that "in spite of the increase of education ther! has been no decrease of this social cancer." My attention has been called t resort in Nashville, within less than two blocks of the public square, where a laige number of abandoned women and profligate men often congregate in the unit ground basement, which is lighted and ventilated only through the pavemen grating; and there in debauchery and carousal they make the night hideous almost morning. What are they sowing but disease, and what Can they reap but death? It is true that much of the moral laxity which exists among us to-day arose o′′‡ of slavery. It is due to a system which whipped women, which dispensed with the institution of marriage, which separated wives from their husbands and assigned them to other men, which ruthlessly destroyed female virtue, and which made helpless women the abject tools of their masters. This is the correct explana tion of our social status to-day, but to explain it is not to excuse it. It is no longer our misfortune, as it was before the war; it is our sin, the wages of which is c excessive number of deaths. Always and everywhere, moral leprosy means phys death. Wherever the colored people are guilty of the immoralities of which Jam Anthony Froude and W. L. Clowes of the Loudon Times accuse them, if they on tinue in them they will be destroyed by them, root and branch. Rome was destroy & because the Empire had no mothers, and Babylon was blotted out because she wa the mother of harlots." A few years ago I said, in a sermon at Fisk University, that wherever the Arg Saxon comes into contact with an inferior race the inferior race invariably goes a the wall. I called attention to the fact that, in spite of humanitarian and pluiss thropic efforts, the printing press, the steam engine, and the electric motor in the hands of the Anglo-Saxon were exterminating the inferior races more rapidly an more surely than shot and shell and bayonet. I mentioned a number of races th have perished, not because of destructive wars and pestilence, but because ib↑ were unable to live in the environment of a nineteenth century civilization; ra whose destruction was not due to a persecution that came to them from withet but to a lack of moral stamina within; races that perished in spite of the huma tarian and philanthropic efforts that were put forth to save them. To that utterance let me now add this thought: That where shot and shell a bayonet and the printing press and the steam engine and the electric motor han slain their thousands, licentious men, unchaste women, and impure homes have sa their tens of thousands; and I speak the words of soberness and truth when Is that if the charges of sexual immoralities brought against us are true, unless the? | be wrought a social revolution among us the handwriting of our destruction t now may be seen on the wall. The history of nations teaches us that neither wa nor famine nor pestilence exterminates them so completely and rapidly as do sex vices. If the cause of our excessive death rate be, in its ultimate analysis, moral rather than sanitary, then this fact ought to appear not only in our vital, but in our cri inal statistics as well. Professor Starr, of Chicago University, claims that in t State of Pennsylvania, where there is little opportunity to assert that the courts aft prejudiced against colored criminals, though the negroes form only 2 per cent of t.* population, yet they furnish 16 per cent of the male prisoners and 34 per cent of female. The race has such great privileges in Chicago and it is dealt with so far and justly that the colored people themselves have denominated it the "Negroes Heaven;" and yet, according to Professor Starr, while the negroes form only 1 cent of the population of Chicago they furnish 10 per cent of the arrests. I convinced that the immorality which accounts for these criminal conditions is as responsible for the race's physical status; and if we are to strike at the root of the matter, it will not be at sanitary regulations, but at social reconstruction and mora regeneration. |