years past, largely for the colored people. I am convinced that no money has been better spent, and that the South to-day shows the result of what has been done for it in the revival of its industries, the improved conditions of society, and the great awakening of its educational life. But this sum, great as it may be, is so little for the educacation of 18,000,000 people, with more than 3,000,000 children and youth of elementary school age. Within that time the South itself has expended more than seventy-five mil lions from its own poverty. It will require the uttermost effort at home, reënforced by the national bounty and encouraged by all that the benevolence of the North can furnish for a generation to come, to place these people within sight of the least favored of our Northern States in that education which is the soul of every good institution and the security of the nation. And no money, public or private, can be so well invested for a generation to come as that which helps lift up the lower side of American society everywhere to intelligence, industry, religion, and patriotic devotion to the new life of the Republic.

I make this claim, because I know from actual observation the wide spread poverty and the great necessities of at least ten of these States, as contrasted with the marvelous prosperity of every portion of the North. Within the past four years I have journeyed through every Northern State from the Atlantic to the Mississippi; have skirted its Atlantic coast, sailed upon its lakes and rivers, penetrated its open country on all its great lines of railroad, and visited almost every city of 50,000 people in its imperial domain. I know and see with what lavish hand our people are spending for their own comfort and for all good and noble causes; and I deplore the awful waste of money in our new Northern luxury-millions wasted every year only to curse our children and youth and blight every sacred interest of the land. Oh, could one-half the money that has been thrown away in useless, almost criminal selfindulgence, by our Northern people during this past summer be used for these perishing minds and clouded souls, what a glorious expansion might be given to God's kingdom of light and peace and love through half these United States.

And finally the humblest of us can pray and talk and help create a public opinion that will speed this good work of reconciliation, and hasten the day when all our people shall be as one in the common hope and heritage of a Christian patriotism, the final bond of the union of hearts and of States.

But now, dear friends, are you still incredulous of the truth of my story and the wisdom of my counsels? Do you say, "It is impossible that a people so lately our bitter enemies should have come into any such accord as this, should be really so eager for the building up of American society, or at heart be ready to welcome the ministry of education with its prophecy of the new time?" Let me answer by a little picture of what once befell me in my wanderings up and down these broad Southlands, "all of which I saw, and part of which I was.

Late in the autumn of the doleful year 1862 I went out from Albany, N. Y., where I then lived, with a party of friends, to make speeches for the Union and persuade young men to enlist in the Army, depleted by the disastrous peninsula campaign. We came to a pleasant village under the shadow of the Catskills and were welcomed most heartily by the young Presbyterian parson of the place. He opened our meeting with a mighty prayer for the Union, and closed it with a solemn consecration of himself to the cause and an appeal to his young men to fall in, and a whole rank of them did fall in, and he went with them to the field. We left him, and his very name had long been buried out of sight under the avalanche of twenty revolutionary years. One rainy day in February, 1882, my feet first touched the soil of the State of South Carolina at a village up in its north western corner. The bottom was out of the muddy little town; but a deputation of friendly men were there to offer me the "freedom of the city," establish me in the chamber of honor at the hotel, and escort me to an evening reception by the master of the public white school,-a pushing son of Pennsylvania who had built his own schoolhouse and cottage for a private school, but, when he saw the public need, had turned it over for the people's

use.

Next morning the sun came out; and we went, all together, for a forenoon with the white children. After the round of ceremonies that always follows a stranger's visit and the regulation speech to the assembled crowd from the stranger, the boys and girls were dismissed for the day, partly as a compliment to the "visitor from Boston," and partly that the group of ladies and gentlemen and the teachers might wait on him to the colored public school.

So, crowded in a procession of spacious vehicles, we slowly navigated the red-mud sea across the town to the colored school. All the way the people were filling my ears with praises of the famous schoolmaster from the North, who had come there after the war, gathered the little colored folk in a shanty, and so wrought himself into their hearts that, when the Presbyterian Church, North, built for him a great schoolhouse, they paid his teachers and used his seminary as their public colored school.

In the midst of their praise the omnibus came to anchor in its last rut, and we all streamed out to where the wonderful master stood to bid us welcome. A moment of startled recollection, groping down through the crowded past, and my hand was caught in both the hands of my young parson of twenty years ago. There he was. He had fought it out in the line of battle to the end, then taken up the grander campaign of peace, bound for the kingdom come. So, through that sunny afternoon, we all sat on the platform in the big schoolhall together, the son of our friend conducting recitations worthy of any school, himself already known as a rising young naturalist in the North. The children sang their pathetic songs, the "stranger from Boston" made as good a speech as the choking in his throat would let him, and we were all of one mind and heart together.

Think of this! Twenty years before that good man and I were praying to the God of battles to go down with lightnings and thunders to overwhelm that furious chivalry who were flinging fire into the very magazine of the Nation, and boasting that the Union was gone and slavery should abide. Now, in that room, the minister of education from New England, the schoolmasters from New York and Pennsylvania, the schoolmistress from the West, the homebred teachers, and the best group of people in a South Carolina village were making a spring holiday together, with no shadow over their heads and no rock of stumbling beneath their feet; and the hand that led us up to this mount of union together was the dusky hand of a little negro child. Verily, in this "grand and awful time" in which we live to-day is once more verified the word of ancient prophecy from the far-off past: "A little child shall lead them."

IV.

THE EDUCATIONAL SITUATION IN THE SOUTH.

A lecture delivered in Washington, D. C., 1889.

For more than seven years I have been engaged in what it may not be vain to call a Ministry of Education through the sixteen Southern States of the Union, including visitations for observation, public lecturing, and private labors in the cause of education, especially of the whole people in common schools. Your attention is invited to an account of the actual educational situation of the Southern people. The situation is presented as the result of wide experience in every department of Southern school life, after many years of observation through all portions of the North.

The object of this address, while correcting some false impressions, is mainly to enforce the duty of the whole American people as private citizens, members of churches, and represented in Congress, to extend the helping hand to this portion of the country while in its present condition of imperative educational need.

Up to the year 1860 Northern public opinion undoubtedly failed to appreciate the educational status and the general mental power and social force of the Southern portion of the Union. Nothing is so difficult as the attempt of an aristocratic and a democratic order of society to understand each other. In 1860 the North was the most powerful democratic and the South the most concentrated and formidable aristocratic social order in Christendom. Although Southern society was greatly modified by our republican form of government, the institution of slavery was prac tically an aristocratic and military organization. No 2,000,000 of civilized people, in 1860, were so powerful in national affairs as this body,never including more than onefourth the white and one-sixth the entire population of the fifteen Southern States. Its educational training for a century, though inferior in letters, had perhaps been superior, as a drill in political and social executive ability, to that of the North. Its schooling was modeled on the old English idea--colleges and academies, with a few notable exceptions of the denominational religious type, largely administered by the Protestant clergy, for the superior class; supplemented often by the best schools in the North and European study. This education was absorbed by the executive, political, and social life of a class which monopolized the wealth of an imperial realm, and had leisure, not only for home administration, but, from the first, largely to control the policy of the national government. There was no schooling, save occasional private teaching of the elements, for the 5,000,000 slaves.

For the several millions of nonslaveholding whites, there was no established system of education like the Northern common school. From the days of Thomas Jefferson, many of the most eminent Southern educators labored with the difficult problem of common-school education for the white "common people"; and, in almost every State, more than one attempt was made to establish it. In several large cities a respectable system of common schools existed; and in 1860, in a few States, there seemed a better hope for the masses. Doubtless a good deal was done by private effort and the church, especially among the bright children of poor families. But there was no general success in dealing with this department of popular instruction.

There were no reliable statistics of Southern illiteracy before 1860, although occasional glimpses show it to have been very extensive. Still, the nonslaveholding Southern white man had developed under the severe training of border life for a century. He had colonized eight immense new commonwealths in the South, and 1860 found him as good revolutionary war material as existed in the world. While it firmly holds together, no form of society is so powerful for concentrated effort as the high aristocratic. In 1860 the eleven seceding States represented one of the most effective public forces of Christendom; capable of being clenched in an iron fist whose persistent blows almost wore out the courage and patience of the mighty American Nation, extorted the admiration of foreign lands, and made every intelligent Northern statesman realize that the only safety for republican institutions on this continent was in keeping the South inside the Union. No thoughtful scholar will disparage the training that shaped such a people amid the hardships and deprivations of a new country.

But the year 1865 witnessed such an overthrow of Southern society as was never seen in modern times. The leading class was plunged in financial ruin, with nothing left but the land on which it stood-a prostration of all material interests such as our prosperous Northern people neither did nor could understand. And, although during the past twenty years new industries have been developed, new resources discovered, capital somewhat attracted, a vigorous immigration directed to the Southwest, and the whole population placed in a more comfortable state, yet the Southern people today, in comparison with the Northern, are very poor. Several millions of respectable white folk are living there in a way which must be seen to be appreciated.

The entire educational side of the South went down in this general wreck. For ten years school-keeping among the white people of the eleven seceding States went on in the face of almost insurmountable difficulties. In these troubled years the North and the Nation began the good work of schooling the freedmen, with occasional attention to the poorer whites. The provisional governments all put on paper, and some of them in operation, the Northern system of common schools. But not until 1870, in several States not until 1876, did the responsible white people really face the great question of free public education-the fundamental question in a democracy-the question which, after a thousand years' experimenting with other schemes, the liberal statesmen of Great Britain are compelled to face to-day.

One of the most deplorable results of this educational interregnum was the launching of a generation of white people into active life with the most meager schooling. Multitudes of Southern children of this period are now wrestling with active life with a most inadequate outfit from the schoolroom. The sudden conferring of the ballot on the Negro also made his absolute ignorance of letters both a local and a national peril.

The result of all this is that, spite of such efforts as will be described farther on, the eleven ex-Confederate States found themselves in 1880 involved in an illiteracy that no man who knows its extent and quality will attempt to ignore or underrate. We can read these startling figures in the census. There we learn that eight Southern States have over 40 per cent of illiterates; that in several of them, this illiteracy involves nearly half the people; that scarcely one-half the legal school population of the South are even enrolled in schools; that the average attendance is largely below the enrollment; that the schools in the open country, where nine-tenths the people live, probably do not average a four months' session in the year, with teachers often incompetent and always poorly paid, and the whole school arrangements frequently of the most primitive sort.

We must remember that the census classes as literate every person who can read and write in any degree, with a prepossession towards a favorable showing. But between the absolutely illiterate class and an intelligent American citizenship there abides a large section of the Southern people that makes small use of the little reading and writing that it has. Outside the educated class, the white masses of the

South, though doubtless advancing, are not yet a reading people. The free library is rising only in a few cities, and the vast majority have no access to collections of books. Outside a few dozen leading newspapers, the average Southern journal is meager, local, and read by only a portion of the people. Vast numbers of both races are educated chiefly by preaching and political speaking. The presence of these large bodies of illiterate people, especially among the Negroes and lower whites, is also a great hindrance to the good schooling of the children. Thousands of worthy families are too poor to give their youth more than this very imperfect country-school train. ing, with possibly a year at the nearest academy.

Any reliable and intelligent observer of American affairs can see how all this involves industry, religion, social life, public order and morals, and political virtue in difficulties that no statesmanship can at once relieve and no direct exercise of national power suppress. Every thoughtful Southern man understands that this condition, commonly named "Illiteracy," is a most alarming portent. These people tell us that nothing but a mighty and persistent educational movement, which shall lift up the lower strata of the Southern people to the level of a progressive American citizenship, can save this region from greater calamities than have yet assailed it. A great deal of popular misapprehension yet prevails among friendly and well-informed people in the North regarding the Southern situation in general and the condition of the eleven ex-Confederate States in particular. It would greatly help all estimates of Southern affairs to remember that the ruling race in the Southern States is almost exclusively of Anglo-Saxon descent, only modified by American life. For the last twenty years these people have behaved as an Anglo-Saxon people, with an aristocratic form of society modified by democratic tendencies, has always behaved under similar circumstances. The Anglo-Saxon man, in practical affairs, while slow to surrender old opinions, for which he has long toiled and greatly suffered, is quick to discern the limit at which the struggle must end, and hastens to seize on the vital elements in the new situation and work on the line of progress at whatever sacrifice of sentiment or apparent consistency. The Southern people who lived through the great war are not ready to fall on the neck of Mr. Sherman or Mr. Edmunds with the confession that for a hundred years their fathers were all wrong in their faith in the dominant sovereignty of the State and that they themselves were treasonable in fighting out the extreme form of that theory to its final decision.

But no influential portion of the active Southern people is to-day working on a line of hostility to the American Union. Were any foreign power to threaten the nation, the star-spangled banner would go up as soon in Charleston and New Orleans as in Boston and Chicago, and the first young men to shoulder the musket might be the sons of the soldiers who laid down their arms in 1865. The Southern people certainly share the defect of the national character in not being an ideal people. Like the population of every portion of the country, they are afflicted with their own local infirmities and sins; but if history records any people who, with all their mistakes, have done more things worthy of mark in the past twenty years, under circumstances in any way similar, we have not read that page.

With the usual exceptions, these people are now at work, in a fairly vigorous and practical way, to get a living, develop their wonderful material resources, attract capital and immigration, and deal with affairs as they come up with the best wisdom and virtue at hand. Especially do I find the more energetic class of Southern youth working on the same lines, inspired by the same hopes as our Northern young people; leaving or staying at home, pushing to the front, appreciating the great advantages of American citizenship. And, if the Southern women of 1860 were distinguished for their zeal in the great revolt, it may as truly be said that multitudes of their daughters are to-day coming to the front in the new upbuilding in a style that gives new luster to the young womanhood of the republic.

The educational movement in the South since the war has been largely the work of the Southern educational public, as the educational public is always the soul of