350 HUMAN BIOLOGY 



even survive when the death rate exceeded the birth rate. 

 Immigration from the land and from other countries could 

 not long make good the losses from disease when half of all 

 the babies born died within the year. Even with birth rates 

 almost twice as high as those prevaiHng in our cities today, 

 the annual death rates of London and New York in the 

 middle of the nineteenth century not infrequently exceeded 

 them. 



The alarm raised, together with the constant evidence 

 on all sides that the wealth and influence, the commerce 

 and industry of the cities were at stake, created a pubHc 

 opinion which was finally responsible for the era of modern 

 municipal sanitation. 



Seventy-five years ago the large cities of Europe and 

 America were unsafe for human habitation. Death rates of 

 30 per thousand of the population were not uncommon and 

 the loss of child Hfe was appalhng. Extinction was prevented 

 by the organization of services and facihties for disposal 

 of human waste, the provision of safe food and water, 

 some control of housing and work places, and specific 

 measures for Hmiting the spread of the communicable 

 diseases. 



There are cities in the United States today where the 

 Negro fraction of the population, constituting from 10 

 to 20 per cent of the total, shows an excess of deaths over 

 births. The urbanized Negro, the most primitive of the 

 races engulfed in city industrial fife, sufl'ers as the white 

 races of England and America did in our cities of 1850, 

 from factors which are not solely those of educational and 

 economic disadvantages. 



Everywhere the Jew exhibits a superiority to other races 

 in his abihty to survive the city handicaps, possibly as a 

 result of the long centuries of enforced ghetto existence 

 in many lands, and his thriftiness, his intelhgent use of 

 professional and communal services for his health protection. 



Municipal sanitation saved the hfe of the city. The city 

 would now be king. In fact the balance of power not only of 

 wealth, but of actual numbers of our population has shifted 

 to these artificial environments we have created. The 

 city seems now to supply to the majority of our people those 



