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 relative status of the two races.

Not

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. 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

causes had made the colored people what they were intellectually and morally, and their condition, in these respects, afforded, as I think, reasonable ground for the doubt entertained.

I am glad to say that these hindrances, so far as they rest upon long standing habits of thought, upon lack of information in respect to the new educational policy, upon the violent innovations on established modes of framing organic law, and upon speculations in reference to questions of race, have well nigh disappeared. The people of the South have consented to give up the old and try the new; they have studied the philosophy of the modern educational system, and many have studied with approval; they have dismissed speculative theories and have accepted what they now consider accomplished facts. The most convincing proof of these declarations is found in the fact that constitutions conforming to the new ideas are generally being adopted throughout the South by conventions in which men of the old school hold absolute sway, and an honest effort is being made everywhere throughout that entire section to educate all the children, irrespective of race. The greatest obstacle of all, that to which I first alluded and to which I now again refer, still remains, viz, our poverty and the vast number of the helpless thrown upon our hands. Out of this hard, stern fact grows the great, the overshadowing need of the South at this time, viz, more means. True, there are other needs. We need a deeper and more general public interest in education than can be excited among a partially educated population. We need a more intelligent comprehension of our educational situation than can be found among our rulers. We need a much larger and more enterprising body of thoroughly qualified teachers for both our white and colored schools, and especially for the latter. We need very much an adequate number of well endowed, well manned normal schools for keeping up this supply of well trained teachers. To these and similar topics the minds of some experienced educators would doubtless have turned in presenting my theme. But our need of means, the great, the ever present, the all pervading need, which for years past has been resting upon my mind, and blocking up the way to success in every grade of educational effort, whether in the college, the high school, the academy, or the common school, took possession of my mind when I entered upon this discussion; and I could not refrain from such a statement of historic and other facts and such a train of thought and argument as might enable me to bring out this one great need in all the weight of its overwhelming emphasis.

A few more thoughts now and this hour's work will be done. I have said that the people of the South are making an honest effort to educate the children of all classes, irrespective of race. I might have made that statement stronger. I might, with truth, have characterized the effort as heroic. Solomon says, "He that ruleth his spirit is better than he that taketh a city;" if the spectacle of self-conquest in an individual is sublime, what shall we say of the spectacle when a whole people