alien blood come to tend an inferior. Social position and understanding sympathy, then, render the Negro doctor readily accessible and very useful. Moreover, the Negro’s physical condition offers the doctor large opportunities for noble service. In a book upon “Ethnic Factors in the Population of Boston,” Doctor Bushee says, “In Boston the mortality of the Negro is much larger than that of any other ethnic factor”; again, “A high death rate, instead of a low birthrate is causing the Negroes to disappear”; and the statistics are not much more encouraging in many other urban communities North and South. That relatively low economic position is a powerful factor in producing this alarming death rate, I have already suggested; another capital factor is pitiable ignorance of the rudiments of personal hygiene and of sanitation. Negro doctors may without much trouble diffuse throughout a community these rudiments of knowledge and in so doing will prove themselves public servants. North and South the conspicuous financial success and substantial social service of hundreds of Negro doctors eloquently establish the correctness of this view; and of practising physicians, the Negro people to-day have unmistakably too few.

[13]

What of the Negro business man? In Washington public employment and the professions have captured most of the energetic and alert Negroes, to the injury of business development. Springfield, Massachusetts; Richmond, Virginia; Dayton, Ohio,—not one of these important cities has a total population as large as the Negro population of the District of Columbia. As buyers of goods, eighty-seven[14] thousand people are important; but as sellers of goods, the eighty-seven thousand Negroes in Washington are by no means important. For example, of the total profits on the dry goods bought in a year by the Negro population of Washington,—profits amounting to thousands and thousands of dollars, for the ratio of expenditure to income is exceptionally large,—what per cent. goes to Negro merchants? Shall I say five per cent., one per cent., or one thousandth of one per cent.? Mathematical precision is, of course, not possible but you and I know that practically none of these profits go to Negro merchants. And you and I could name a dozen white merchants who have been enriched by those profits. And in consideration of this fact how many Negro clerks have the white merchants placed in their stores? how many Negro floor walkers? how many Negro buyers? And, my friends, how many thousands of years must elapse before the Washington Negro will add to his culture enough co-operative endeavor and competitive power to change all this? I myself have never yet been 

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