of public schools free to all. The percentage of illiteracy of the white race has been reduced from twenty-five per cent to fifteen per cent, and of the colored race from eighty-seven per cent to forty-five per cent. 5. Owing primarily to the patriotic genius of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, and the human enthusiasm of a select group of patient men and women in both sections and of both races, the two greatest experiment stations in the world for the training of a backward race have been established in the South, and a wise direction given to the education of the African element in our body politic, whose training was missing the mark widely, owing to unintelligent zeal for their welfare on the one hand, and a mingling of resentment and despair on the other. 6. The ability of this generation to recognize education as something larger than mere learning or even discipline, to perceive it as a great force moulding national character, has caused the enlistment into this field of work of young men and young women of creative capacity and exalted character, who, under other conditions in Southern history, would have instinctively turned to political and social fields for distinction and service. 7. The tardy appearance of these States in the field of democratic education has given them an opportunity which they will not pass by, to avoid many of the educational errors of the more forward American communities. Already one notes in their curricula an insistence upon the studies that give emphasis to the duties of men and the glory of service, rather than to the rights of man and the splendors of achievement. The whole educational curriculum reveals the mood of the Southern mind in the effort made in it to discipline the will, to understand social and economic causes, and to see the life about it, not as an atom, but as a part of a related whole. 8. Finally, it may be said that the South, educationally, has passed from the stage of public opinion-making to one of constructiveness and technique, and the child has become the focus of scientific concern in law and politics. General Assemblies spend one-half of their revenue and two-thirds of their time in the passage of laws touching the welfare of youth. The leading educational measures before the Virginia Legislature of this year were these: A bill to bring about scientific equalization of taxation; a bill to bring about co-ordination and unity in the whole educational scheme; the development of secondary education as the nexus between the separate parts; bills providing further facilities for the training of teachers, and a bill for compulsory education. The advent of the scientific spirit in education and in the field of economics and sociology is revealed both by the character of such legislation and by the creation of chairs of education, economics and sociology in Southern institutions. In 1895 such studies practically did not form parts of college curricula. Today no leading University is without such chairs, and the men in them are helping to shape and enact constructive legislation. The questions arising out of the presence of the African in American life, are not questions to be incidentally discussed. A wealth of ignorance has been expended on their discussion which quite sickens the heart. The deeper one's knowledge goes, the greater one's desire for silence and patience. I would, however, leave these thoughts with you. There are over 8,000,000 negroes in the South to-day. Each Southern State, resisting every effort to distribute its taxation on racial lines, is committed in its statutes and laws to the training of the negro race at public expense. Two million, six hundred thousand colored children are enrolled in the common schools today in the Southern States and seventeen thousand in higher institutions. These enormous figures are striking and pathetic illustrations of the faith of the negro in the moulding power of education. Southern Statcs have spent $120,000,000 on their education. Northern people, out of a noble sense of national responsibility, have contributed $15,000,000 to their education. Mr. Andrew Carnegie, in a recent notable address, has declared that the negro himself, out of his poverty, has expended nearly $10,000,000 exclusive of his share of taxation. The negro race owns nearly $300,000,000 worth of property. This is a pitiful per capita wealth as compared with prosperous white conditions, but it is wealth and not pauperism. Negroes are at work in the South in more varied forms of useful labor than elsewhere on earth. They acquired land, in one State, from 1895 to 1898, at the rate of over fifty-two thousand acres a year. In the twelve Southern States, negro land owners in 1900 owned 173,352 farms. In Virginia, negroes own 1,304,471 acres of land. From a condition of absolute illiteracy, practically 50 per cent of them have become literate. When it is reflected that all this has been achieved in the country in which they were but recently held as slaves, and in which for a time they were placed in an unnatural and absurd attitude of political control, can any sane man assert that they have lived and worked under any conditions of oppression? Is there any parallel in history to such progress under such conditions? If negroes were fierce economic beings like Yankees, or Jews, or Scotchmen, it might be claimed that they had achieved all this in spite of discouragement and oppression, and they do deserve great praise and credit for what they have done; but everyone knows that they are not such beings, and on the contrary, they could not have achieved all this without a strong measure of justice and encouragement, that entitles the people of the Southern States to the credit of having pursued toward them a juster and larger policy than ever before pursued by higher groups toward backward and lower groups in any civilization. Mr. John Morley thinks the negro problem practically unsolvable, and perhaps it is, but practical men must continue to face it resolutely, quietly, justly. It is an American problem in a very concrete sense, but it is largely the genius of Southern leadership that must be relied upon for its wise treatment. Owing to the rapid subdivision of land going on in rural life, in twenty-five years, every Southern and Western city will face the negro problem as an irritating race question, because of the presence of large numbers of Africans in their population. Essentially, the negro as an irritating race issue, is a question of the presence of the African and his numerical proportion to the whole population. In a community of ten thousand white inhabitants and twenty-four negroes, the question is an academic one and the doctrinaire and the sentimentalist have a beautiful time with it. In a community of ten thousand white inhabitants and eighteen hundred negroes, there is less philosophy and more silence. In a community of ten thousand white inhabitants and ten thousand negroes, the policeman supersedes the philosopher in relative importance, and the prob lem moves along, as best it may, over the rough ways of democracy. Perhaps the chiefest political constructive act of Southern genius in reference to the negro, has been the limitation of the whole idea of manhood suffrage, thus removing the blacks from politics, and centering their thought on industrial life, removing frightful temptations from the politics of the white people, and in a large way, placing the whole idea of suffrage on the highest plane possible in a Republic. When all of its ragged edges and incidental injustices have been worn away, the suffrage regulations of the South in the last decade will be seen. to have been wise and philosophical. At the court of present public opinion in the South, the following things, as to the negro-American have been settled: I. The white race shall control the political development of the Southern States, as it will and ought to control the political development of the rest of this Republic. As we were European in our origin and structure, so we shall remain, refusing to become either Asiatic on one side of the continent, or African on the other. 2. Agreement has been reached that in insisting upon absolute social separateness, the South is pursuing a far-sighted policy of justice, both to the negro as a race, and to the higher groups that inhabit this nation and to civilization at large. 3. It has been settled that the emphasis laid by Armstrong, the most heroic figure in the whole struggle, and the wiser leader of the negro race, upon training in the industrial and manual arts, promises the best returns in the development of the masses of that race as useful factors in economic life. 4. It has been settled that no form of peonage or helotry, perils worse than chattel slavery, shall creep into our life. 5. It has been settled that the negro having humanity, personality, economic value, shall be trained for citizenship in this Republic, and that the South itself shall exert intelligent and determining influence upon the character of that training, because it is its duty so to act, and because extraneous influence may carry the negro farther from understanding and sympathy with his environment. 6. It has been settled that the final policy of the South toward this backward man shall be a scientific habit of investigation as to the facts of his progress, coupled with an intelligent interest in his development, causing its thinking people to discriminate between the good individual negro and the negro considered as a mere perplexing, evil problem in sociology. The best Southern thought on this matter is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but watchful and steady. The point of view likely to prevail finally is the point of view that gives foremost place, not to the negro as a pathetic, upward-striving figure, or the negro as a tragic burden, but to the negro as a mighty industrial asset, and to the standards of American character as affected by the presence of the negro in this largest democratic undertaking of the white race. Under changed conditions and in a new age this viewpoint is exactly in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln as expressed in his famous letter to Horace Greeley: "What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help. to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it-if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it-and if I could do it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that." Has any group of human beings ever caused so much social and political ferment and change as the American negro? I wonder if this American negro ever thinks of the relative care bestowed by human society upon him and the 3,000,000 white men who inhabit the thin soil of the coastal plain, the Piedmont Hills, and the Appalachian Mountains. For the negro rivers of blood have flowed, millions of treasures have been spent, patient. lives have been dedicated, and in virtue of all this expenditure of energy, genius, and consecration, a distance has been created between him and his grandfathers equal to the distance between the jungle and the University. The lot of the Piedmont and Appalachian white man has been forgetfulness, ignorance, and neglect. The world might as well understand that the Southerner is done with this neglect forever. He sees that the redemption of his community lies primarily in the restoration and development of the white population. Without such development the most remarkable story of individual negro achievement will tend to become merely an in |