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entitled, if approved, to receive their pro rata of the public fund for teaching any children adjudged by certain magistrates as belonging to the class known as "poor scholars," who may have entered their schools. I need not say to this audience that this so-called system had no system in it, that it was full of defects, and that it was lacking in a hundred of the elements that make up an efficient public school system. Still it answered a valuable purpose in its day. It placed the elements of an imperfect English education within reach of the entire white population, among whom the means of comfortable support were so general as to be well nigh universal. You will better understand this declaration when I tell you that I have spent my entire life in Georgia, and up to the late war I never met, to the best of my recollection, in city, town, village, or country place, a single southern born person asking alms. As to the comparatively small indigent class, what the State may have failed to do for them, the teachers would most gladly have done gratuitously, for, in whatever else they may have been lacking, they generally had kindly hearts.

The colored people, as is well known, we never sought to educate, and indeed the education of this class was finally prohibited by statute, under what I then believed the mistaken impression that this policy was necessary to our domestic security; and viewed from the standpoint of statesmanship alone, it cannot be shown that the State ought to have provided for the education of this class of the people. Education by the State rests upon the sole basis of self-protection. Under the constitution and laws as they then stood the colored people constituted no part of the body politic, and therefore it was no necessary part of statesmanship to provide for their education. Viewed from a moral and religious standpoint, the entire subject is seen in a different light. We are essentially a Christian people, and the belief that the Bible is a revelation from God may be said to be a national belief. Holding this opinion individually and believing that book to contain the only rule of faith and practice for the moral government of human beings, I always thought that no man should be denied intelligent access to it, and large numbers of my brethren at the South shared this conviction.

I have now put plainly before you the whole of educational endeavor in Georgia in ante-bellum times, both in its conception, as that conception found expression in the different constitutions and the laws, and in its execution, as that execution is represented in the work actually done in the schools of both the higher and lower grades. In doing this I have put before you much more vividly than I could have done in any other way the ante-bellum educational work of the South; for what was done in Georgia is about the same as that which was accomplished in every other Southern State. In the name of my southern brethren I am willing to admit that our inferior schools were indeed very inferior, and that in this grade of work we were far behind the older States of the northern portion of the Union; and truth requires the further admission that,

in the higher education, we were not the equals of the States that have given us a Harvard, a Yale, and a Princeton. Yet we were not so far behind in this higher grade of education as many persons have imagined, if we may judge from a single comparison, a comparison of the men in public life who were the products of this higher education in the two sections; for, as long as the truth of history is written, it will be recorded that the men of the South exerted a controlling influence in the national councils for more than half a century of our history.

EDUCATIONAL CHANGES EFFECTED BY THE WAR.

I come now to speak of the new era, the post-bellum period. It would be very difficult for me to put before you anything like an adequate view of the changes wrought by the war. No one, who was not of us, can ever be made to realize their magnitude. I think I may safely say that the history of civilization furnishes no parallel. Let us glance for a moment at some of them. A large portion of the population, in some of the States more than one-half, which had been held by the other under the constitution and laws as property and which made up the bulk of the wealth, was set free in a day. Millions of dollars' worth of other property was destroyed; and that which was left, including the real estate, had no exchangeable value, from the lack of purchasers. The entire currency of the country was blotted out, so that thousands of good citizens did not possess so much of current funds as would buy a meal's victuals or even pay the postage on a letter. The business of agriculture, always the main reliance of the people, was put in what seemed to be a hopeless condition by the derangement of the labor system and by the total inadequacy of the appliances of farming left on hand, such as farm animals, farm supplies, and agricultural implements. Thousands of persons living upon salaries or by the wages of labor, often without a week's subsistence on hand and having large families dependent upon them, were left without employment or the hope of obtaining it.

Great as were these changes in our material condition, they were not greater than the political changes to which we were subjected. At first we were told that we must make certain alterations in the fundamental law of the different States before these States could be restored to their former relations to the General Government. We had not been accustomed to make changes in our organic law at the suggestion of an outside power, but we obeyed. We had not been long thus reconstructed till reconstruction was itself reconstructed. The new governments set up were as speedily pulled down, and we were required to form others. The law providing for the forming of these new governments, a law in the passage of which the South had no voice, enfranchised the recently liberated slaves-who were, as a rule, wholly illiterate-and disfranchised very large numbers of the most intelligent and virtuous of the

white population, thus practically reversing, to a large extent, the rela tive status of the two races.

But it is with the effect of the changes of the war upon the progress of education in the South that I have to deal in this discussion. Most of the States of the South, in adopting new constitutions under the reconstruction acts, incorporated into the fundamental law the public school policy. I must say of the educational provisions of the constitution adopted at that time in my own State, that they were a great move forward. Notwithstanding the mass of ignorance which made up the great body of the convention, it was our good fortune that a few men of great ability and of true statesmanship had found their way into it; to these, doubtless, we owe the wise educational policy then adopted. Not only were constitutions which provide for public education generally adopted, but in every State in the South the attempt has been made to inaugurate a school system under laws passed in accordance with the new constitutional requirements. I propose now to refer briefly to some of the great obstacles that stood in the way of the success of this attempt. I have already referred, in a general way, to the utter wreck of material resources which the South had suffered. I will now give, not only the view of this wreck as presented in reliable statistics, but a further view from the same standpoint of the immense increase in the number of helpless illiterates to be provided for educationally in the new order of things. By the census of 1870, the entire property of the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia (Southern States) amounted to $3,553,757,000; while the census of 1860 shows the same aggregate, at that time, to have been $5,426,041,724. It will thus be seen that the value of all property in the fifteen States named was in 1870 only about three-fifths of such value in 1860. The population of these same fifteen States was in 1870 as follows: white, 9,275,856; colored, 4,472,684. It will thus be seen that nearly one-third of the people of these States, at that time, consisted of recently liberated slaves, owning little, if any, taxable property. Add to the number of freedmen the number of whites impoverished by the then recent war, and the number thus found destitute of material resources would, in all probability, equal one-half of the entire population.

By taking an area of less extent, I am enabled to make a much stronger case. The aggregate value of property in the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas (cotton States) in 1870 was $1,404,487,468; while the same aggregate in 1860 was $3,294,241,406. The population of the States just named in 1870 was, white, 3,896,280; colored, 3,103,860, the colored population being nearly equal to the white. From these figures I feel justified in saying that, while the taxable property of these States was only about three-eighths of what it had been at the begin

ning of the preceding decade, the non-taxpayers must have been very nearly two-thirds of the entire population.

OBSTACLES TO BE OVERCOME IN EXTENDING ELEMENTARY EDUCATION.

I have now put before you, in the vast increase in the burden to be borne and the great diminution in ability to bear it, the greatest of the obstacles to success. There were others, however, to which I must briefly refer. From the sketch of educational achievement in the South in ante-bellum times given in the first part of this address, it will be seen that we had no such thing as public schools among us. Our people had a way of their own of accomplishing educational results, and in this way they were pretty firmly fixed, and, like all other communities where the controlling element is of Anglo-Saxon origin, they are very slow to make changes. This slowness to change is at the foundation of the conservatism everywhere prevailing in southern society, and, when not too persistent, it is an invaluable element of character.

But there was not only among the people a simple indisposition to change there was a lack of the knowledge upon which rational change is always based. Few intelligent men among us had studied the philosophy upon which education by the State rests, its absolute necessity in order to self-protection, its greater universality, its cheapness, and consequent adaptation to an impoverished people, and its superiority as a result of intelligent supervision. These thoughts are now taking possession of the minds of thinking men, but till this result could be brought about it is very evident that no real progress could be made.

Another hindrance to success was not so much opposition to public schools as opposition to the manner in which the public school policy had been ingrafted upon the fundamental law.

I have already sketched the manner in which the new constitutions originated in the Southern States at the close of the war. It is only necessary to place the facts in this sketch before an audience of fairminded citizens in any portion of the Union in order to enable them to understand how intelligent, virtuous, patriotic citizens could feel not only opposition but even aversion to a measure, intrinsically good, in consequence of the manner of its adoption. That this was the ground of much of the opposition, I know from intimate association and contact with all classes of citizens at the South.

I now approach another hindrance which has been much misunderstood, and which I am happy to have the opportunity of presenting in a truthful light before an audience like this. The hindrance to which I allude was the presence among us of so large an element of persons of African descent. It has been thought by many people at the North that the white people of the South entertain feelings of actual hostility toward this race of people. You will allow me to say, in all candor, that no greater mistake has ever been made. It is true that this feeling has prevailed to some extent among the more ignorant and illiberal of our

white population; but the more intelligent and virtuous, constituting the bulk of our white citizens, are strangers to it. We understand this people too well and owe them too much to entertain feelings of hostility toward them. They nursed us in our infancy, were our playmates in childhood, and in manhood they were our domestics and field laborers. They watched over us in sickness, closed our eyes in death, and shed tears at our burial. During the four years of fratricidal strife, when the whole South was a military camp and every able-bodied white man a soldier, they cultivated our fields, protected our families, stood faithfully by us in the presence of armed foes, and wept with us over our brothers and our sons who fell in the deadly conflict. God forbid that we should ever forget the service they rendered us in the hour of our greatest trial! You will believe me, then, when I tell you that it was not hostility to this people that made their presence among us an obstacle to the successful introduction of public schools. I will endeavor to state clearly and briefly one or two of the grounds that made them a hindrance. I have already spoken of the general destruction of the property of the white population. Out of the remnant left them from the wreck very few of them were able to make adequate provision for the education of their own children. Is it surprising, then, that they should feel it a great hardship that they were required also to make provision for the education of the children of those who had themselves, by the laws of the country, constituted a large portion of their wealth? This feeling of hardship was one of the grounds of hindrance.

Another ground was a feeling of uncertainty in the minds of many intelligent men as to the probability of ever making good citizens out of the materials which this race furnishes. Even those among us who are now the strongest advocates of universal education understood this people too well to say that there was not reasonable ground for this doubt. We knew that, in all the history of the past, they had never accomplished anything great intellectually. They had never established anything like regularly organized governments, or enlarged the boundaries of knowledge by discovery, or made any valuable contributions to literature, or increased the productiveness of labor by useful inventions. In their own country they had always been mere savages; when brought here, notwithstanding their bondage, they were greatly raised in the scale of being. Contact with civilization and the labors among them of the different Christian churches did much for them; their moral elevation was greatly retarded, however, by a general lack of anything like true home life among them. God, who made us and knows all that is in us, has appointed the family as the great agency for the moral and intellectual elevation of the race. While many humane masters were always ready voluntarily to make large pecuniary sacrifices rather than be guilty of the great wrong of breaking up families, the different Southern State governments made the great mistake of failing to extend over these home relations the ægis of their protection. These

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