of the American Missionary Association, the American Baptist Home Mission Society, and the Freedmen’s Aid Society—­played a much larger part than they are ordinarily given credit for; and it is a very, very rare occurrence that a graduate of one of the institutions sustained by these agencies, or even one who has attended them for any length of time, has to be summoned before the courts.  Their influence has most decidedly been on the side of law and order.  Undoubtedly some of those who have gone forth from these schools have not been very practical, and some have not gained a very firm sense of relative values in life—­it would be a miracle if all had; but as a group the young people who have attended the colleges have most abundantly justified the expenditures made in their behalf, expenditures for which their respective states were not responsible but of which they reaped the benefit.  From one standpoint, however, the so-called higher education did most undoubtedly complicate the problem.  Those critics of the race who felt that the only function of Negroes in life was that of hewers of wood and drawers of water quite fully realized that Negroes who had been to college did not care to work longer as field laborers.  Some were to prove scientific students of agriculture, but as a group they were out of the class of peons.  In this they were just like white people and all other people.  No one who has once seen the light chooses to live always on the plane of the “man with the hoe.”  Nor need it be thought that these students are unduly crowding into professional pursuits.  While, for instance, the number of Negro physicians and dentists has greatly increased within recent years, the number would still have to be four or five times as great to sustain to the total Negro population the same proportion as that borne by the whole number of white physicians and dentists to the total white population.

The subjects of the criminality and the mortality of the race are in their ultimate reaches closely related, both being mainly due, as we have suggested, to the conditions under which Negroes have been forced to live.  In the country districts, until 1900 at least, there was little provision for improvements in methods of cooking or in sanitation, while in cities the effects of inferior housing, poor and unlighted streets, and of the segregation of vice in Negro neighborhoods could not be otherwise than obvious.  Thus it happened in such a year as 1898 that in Baltimore the Negro death rate was somewhat more and in Nashville just a little less than twice that of the white people.  Legal procedure, moreover, emphasized a vicious circle; living conditions sent the Negroes to the courts in increasing numbers, and the courts sent them still farther down in the scale.  There were undoubtedly some Negro thieves, some Negro murderers, and some Negroes who were incontinent; no race has yet appeared on the face of the earth that did not contain members