At a conference held at Atlanta University, Professor Harris, of Fisk University, concluded:[39]—

“I have now covered the ground to which our excessive death-rate is mainly due; namely, pulmonary diseases, especially consumption and pneumonia, scrofula, venereal diseases, and infant mortality. If we eliminate these diseases, our excessive death-rate will be a thing of the past.... While I do not depreciate sanitary regulations and a knowledge of hygienic laws, I am convinced that a sine qua non of a change for the better in the negro’s physical condition is a higher social morality.... From the health reports of all our large Southern cities we learn that a considerable amount of our infant mortality is due to inanition, infantile debility, and infantile marasmus. Now what is the case in regard to these diseases? The fact is that they are not diseases at all, but merely the names of symptoms due to enfeebled constitutions and congenital diseases, inherited from parents suffering from the effects of sexual immorality and debauchery.... It is true that much of the moral laxity which exists among us to-day arose out of slavery.... 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 our excessive number of deaths.... The presence of tubercular and scrofulous diseases, consumption, syphilis, and leprosy, has caused the weaker nations of the earth to succumb before the rising tide of Christian civilization.... The history of nations teaches us that neither war, nor famine, nor pestilence, exterminates them so completely as do sexual vices.”

CHAPTER IV

NINETEENTH CENTURY ADDITIONS

It is only since the year 1820 that the government of the United States has kept a record of alien passengers arriving in this country. For several years following 1820 the immigration was so slight as to be almost negligible. It was not until 1820 that there were more than 20,000 arrivals. So accustomed have we become to large figures of immigration that nothing less than 100,000 seems worth noting, and this figure was not reached until 1842. Since then there have been only four years of less than 100,000, and two of these were years of the Civil War.

A striking fact which first attracts the attention of one who examines the statistics since 1840 is the close sympathy between immigration and the industrial prosperity and depression of this country. Indeed, so close is the connection that many who comment on the matter have held that immigration during the past century has been strictly an industrial or economic phenomenon, depending on the opportunities in this country, and that the religious and political causes which stimulated earlier immigration no longer hold good.

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