e same assimilative education
which is given at the North to all children alike, whereby native and
foreign, black and white, are taught side by side in every grade of
instruction, and are compelled by the exigencies of discipline to keep
their prejudices in abeyance, and are given the opportunity to learn and
appreciate one another's good qualities, and to establish friendly
relations which may exist throughout life, is absent from the Southern
system of education, both of the past and as proposed for the future.
Education is in a broad sense a remedy for all social ills; but the
disease we have to deal with now is not only constitutional but acute. A
wise physician does not simply give a tonic for a diseased limb, or a high
fever; the patient might be dead before the constitutional remedy could
become effective. The evils of slavery, its injury to whites and blacks,
and to the body politic, was clearly perceived and acknowledged by the
educated leaders of the South as far back as the Revolutionary War and the
Constitutional Convention, and yet they made no effort to abolish it.
Their remedy was the same--time, education, social and economic
development;--and yet a bloody war was necessary to destroy slavery and
put its spirit temporarily to sleep. When the South and its friends are
ready to propose a system of education which will recognize and teach the
equality of all men before the law, the potency of education alone to
settle the race problem will be more clearly apparent.

At present even good Northern men, who wish to educate the Negroes, feel
impelled to buy this privilege from the none too eager white South, by
conceding away the civil and political rights of those whom they would
benefit. They have, indeed, gone farther than the Southerners themselves
in approving the disfranchisement of the colored race. Most Southern men,
now that they have carried their point and disfranchised the Negro, are
willing to admit, in the language of a recent number of the _Charleston
Evening Post_, that "the attitude of the Southern white man toward the
Negro is incompatible with the fundamental ideas of the republic." It
remained for our Clevelands and Abbotts and Parkhursts to assure them that
their unlawful course was right and justifiable, and for the most
distinguished Negro leader to declare that "every revised Constitution
throughout the Southern States has put a premium upon intelligence,
ownership of property, thrift an