question but that the intelligent black will be allowed to approach the ballot-box and exercise his right to vote as impartially as the intelligent white man. The restriction of the ballot will do away largely with the acute issue. It now remains in the line of our discussion to ascertain what has been done for the Negro in the way of education in the South, and what has been the effect of education upon the Negro, whether he has appreciably progressed by reason of that education in the direction of an intelligent voting citizenship. If you so restrict his ballot, will he ever become sufficiently intelligent? It has been somewhat the fashion among certain of our Northern friends to hold out the idea that it has been a half-hearted attempt upon the part of the South to educate the Negro, and that what has been done has been done largely through Northern philanthropy, and that the South has only been playing at public education. Let me say that the war left the South absolutely prostrated, farms devastated, homes destroyed, manufactories levelled, State and personal credit entirely gone through twelve years of actual battle and political debauchery. The South, rising from its stricken condition, undertook honestly and faithfully to educate her former slaves. I will be pardoned for a full discussion of the statistics applying to the education of the Negroes for the twofold purpose of showing the great increase of educational facilities in the South, and the intelligent appreciation of the education upon the part of the Negroes. The settlement of this question is crucial to our discussion. In the slave-holding States in 1870-71, there was expended by the South $800,000 in round numbers for the education of the colored race. The expenditure per capita of the school population was $2.97 for the white and 49c. for the Negro. In 1872 and 1873, this sum had increased to practically $1,000,000 on the part of the South, with an increase to 54c. per capita for the colored population. Mark you, this was in a year when in my State a man who had carried a musket in the Southern army was not allowed either to vote or to hold office; when the South had not yet risen from the ashes of her destroyed homes. In 1878, for the Negro, there was expended in the Southern States, in round numbers, $2,200,000, with an expenditure of $1.09 per capita for the colored race, double what it had been five years before. In 1886 and 1887, it had risen to the grand total of $4,500,000 for the education of the colored race, and $1.86 expenditure per capita for that race. In 1891 and 1892, it had risen to $5,500,000 for the colored race, or $2.15 per capita for the colored Southern school population. In 1897 and 1898, this sum had swollen to $6,600,000, in round numbers, with a per capita of expenditure for the colored school population, to $2.34. In absolute school expenditure in all these years, with the States rocking from the throes of a revolution such as the world has never seen, the Southern people of the United States expended in round numbers $103,000,ooo for their former slaves. This statement will be emphasized by the propositions that in Georgia the Negroes in 1892 returned, in round numbers, $15,000,ooo of taxable property, against $450,000,000 returned by the whites; that in North Carolina, in 1891, there was $234,000,000 worth of property listed for taxation by the white people, as against only $8,000,000 for the colored people, and in the State of South Carolina, $1.81 is raised from each taxpayer to provide $1.00 for each school child; while in Montana only 36c. has to be raised. I would think that the example of South Carolina alone would be an answer to any criticism on the part of any section when you will understand that two-thirds of the taxpayers in South Carolina are colored, and they possess scarcely any property in the State. In Virginia, in 1891, the tax collected from white citizens amounted to $3,000,000 in round numbers, and from the colored citizens, $163,000. The amount paid for public schools for the whites, $588,000, and for the Negroes, $324,000. In all of the Southern school systems there is no distinction against the Negroes, except to say that there shall be separate schools. But pardon this digression from my main argument. Let us by actual figures carefully consider the effect of education upon the Negro. Is he approximating the intelligent voting citizen? Says the School Commissioner of the United States: "The enrollment of the colored people was a little more than 27 per cent. of the full enrollment in the Southern States, and they received upwards of 20 per cent. of the money expended. As a matter of fact, a comparatively small amount of this was collected from the taxation of colored citizens." I quote the able Commissioner: "The white people of the South believed that the State should place a commonschool education within the reach of every child, and they have done this much to give every citizen, white and black, an even start in life." Now, continuing our statement, has the Negro since the war increased his intelligence to such an extent as to justify the argument that within a comparatively short time he will become an intelligent citizen and win an intelligent as well as a legal right to citizenship? I again follow the discussion of the intelligent Commissioner of Educa tion. It is authoritative as well as careful. "In 1870, more than 85 per cent. of the colored population of the South over ten years of age could not read. In 1880 the illiterate had been reduced to 75 per cent., and in 1890 to 60 per cent. of the colored population. In many of the States of the South the percentage is even below 50. In thirty years 40 per cent. of the illiteracy of the Negro race had entirely disappeared. "The total enrollment in the public schools of the sixteen Southern States and the District of Columbia for the year 1896-7 was 5,398,076, the number of colored children being 1,460,084 and the number of white children 3,937,992. The estimated number of the chil dren in the South from five to eighteen years of age was 8,625,770. Of this number, 2,816,340, or 32.65 per cent., were children of the Negro race, and 5,809,430, or 67.35 per cent., were white children. It will be seen that the number of colored children enrolled was 51.84 per cent. of the colored school population, and the number of white children enrolled was 67.79 per cent. of the white school population. The average daily attendance in the public schools of the Southern States was 3,565,611, the number in the colored schools being 904,505, or 61.95 per cent. of the colored school enrollment, and the number in the average attendance in the white schools being 2,661,106, or 67.58 per cent. of the white school enrollment. 'It may be noted that in Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, the colored school population exceeds the white school population. In Kentucky, the number of colored children enrolled was 65.52 per cent. of the colored school population, a percentage of enrollment for the colored schools greater than in any other State, and larger than the percentage of white enrollment in at least six of the Southern States. In the colored schools of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and South Carolina, the average daily attendance was a greater percentage of their enrollment than was credited to the white schools of the same States upon their enrollment. Of the 119,893 public-school teachers in the Southern States, 27,435 belong to the colored race. There was one colored teacher to every 33 colored children in |