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Americans, but by some of the "best white blood" of the States in which they were born.

The but recently ignorant slave, with his primitive characteristics practically undeveloped, cannot reasonably be expected to absorb the culture of his former master in half a century; the development of a race is a slow process. It took the children of Israel four hundred years to recover from their Egyptian bondage, and the Germans hundreds of years to absorb the Roman culture, while the Anglo-American is the product of the upward development of the race since time began.

At the time when the slave trade was at its height, the negroes in Africa were living in a state approaching savagery. Cannibalism was prevalent; slavery in its worst forms was universal; religion was a mass of the grossest superstitions; the sexual passions were ungoverned; marriage was a living together for a longer or shorter time; human life was subject to the will of the chief; social and climatic conditions made accumulations of property unnecessary; and education and culture had never entered their life.

Coming from such a home on the Dark Continent, living in the Southland under conditions of slavery, and having but a half-century of freedom to develop the native faculties, but little can be expected of the race at the present time.

As a matter of fact, however, there is no dead line in education beyond which the American

negro cannot go. Negroes have taken the highest honors at Yale, and at Harvard, and at seventy other colleges, in competition with white scholars; and over four hundred negroes have received the Bachelor's degree from these institutions.

These evidences of achievement are a clear demonstration of the possibilities of the race and are an indication of the heights to which this people is capable of attaining.

To-day, all schoolhouses, of whatever sort, opened to the negro in the Southland are crowded with pupils willing and anxious to learn, thereby evidencing a strong tendency on the part of the race to improve and develop intellectually.

The question of the relative capacity of the white and black races as to acquisitive faculties and inquisitive power possesses only an academic interest. It is sufficient to know that the negro possesses the ability to acquire knowledge, to interpret it in terms of his own thoughts and feelings, and to apply it effectively to the world' swork.

Mark the words of our first President, George Washington: "Promote, then, as an object of primary importance the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that this should be enlightened." And, finally, consider the advice of the present occupant of the White House, Theodore Roosevelt:

"The white man, if he is wise, will decline to allow

the negroes in a mass to grow to manhood and womanhood without education. Unquestionably education such as is obtained in our public schools does not do everything toward making a man a good citizen, but it does much. The lowest and most brutal criminals, those for instance who commit the crime of rape, are in the great majority men who have had either no education or very little; just as they are almost invariably men who own no property; for the man who puts money by out of his earnings, like the man who acquires education, is usually lifted above mere brutal criminality." 1

Nothing can be more certain than this illuminative fact that if the white people of the South, the people who know the negro thoroughly, and who are fully aware of the effects of all the efforts made for his improvement, could perceive any dangerous problem, any evil tendencies arising out of the education of the negro, they would not be engaged in taxing themselves from one year to another in order that he may receive the benefits of education. Men will theorize when it costs. them nothing, but only those will suffer deprivation who firmly believe in the cause for which they give. Every Southern State is appropriating money for the education of the negro, and there is not a Southern community that is not contributing its due share.

"Who," asked Thomas Carlyle, "would suppose that Message to Congress, December 5, 1906.

education were a thing which had to be advocated on the ground of local expediency, or, indeed, on any ground? As if it stood not on the basis of everlasting duty, as a prime necessity of man. It is a thing which needs no advocating. To impart the gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and yet who could in that case think-this, one would imagine, was the first function a government had to set about discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province of an empire, the inhabitants living all mutilated in their limbs each strong man with his right arm lamed? How much crueller to find the strong soul with its eyes sealed, its eyes extinct, so that it does not see... Heavier wrong is not done under the sun." And exclaimed Carlyle: "That one man should die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy."

(B) ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS.-Although the negro was freed against the protests of the South, no sooner was the emancipation an accomplished fact than the Southern white man, though facing destitute homes, blasted hopes, shattered industrial systems, and staggering under his burden of poverty, set about the task of educating the colored man for freedom. Four and a half millions of totally uneducated colored people had been freed and left upon his hands for assimilation and for some form of education, with all but 200,000 of the race living south of the Mason and Dixon line. This involved the setting up of a double educational system, with all the extra expense which

such a plan involved. Heroically he worked in the face of odds not equalled in any other part of this country, and great was the good he accomplished.

The Freedmen's Bureau, established by act of Congress, March 3, 1865, from 1865 to 1869, with the expenditure of $6,513,955, in addition to starting a system for free labor, of peasant proprietorship, and of securing the recognition of the colored freedman before the courts of law, founded 4239 free common schools for colored children throughout the South, under the direction of 9307 teachers and having an enrolment of 247,333 pupils. By 1870, every Southern State had made constitutional and legislative provisions for free schools and a general system of education. Twelve States had some form of control, eight had provided for county supervision, normal schools had been started in six, agricultural and industrial colleges in a still larger number, and progress had been made in grading the schools in the large cities. It is true that the North had helped in this work through the Peabody and other funds, and the Federal government had extended its aid; but the great bulk of labor and funds came from the South itself. Considering that but thirty-five years have elapsed since its educational machinery was really started, magnificent progress has been made.

Since that time the common schools in the South have been increasing in number year by year, and