radical change in human
nature. As the proportion of negroes able to read and write grows
larger, they will certainly demand full political rights, which the mass
of the whites, so far as any one can judge, will be unwilling to allow.
Deportation to Africa--proposed in all seriousness--is impossible. Negro
babies are born faster than they could easily be carried away, even if
there were no other obstacle. The suggestion that whites be expelled
from a State or two, which would then be turned over to negroes, is
likewise impracticable. Amalgamation apparently is going on more slowly
now, and more rapid progress would presuppose a state of society and an
attitude toward the negro entirely different from that which prevails
anywhere in the United States. There is left then the theory that, with
increasing wealth and wider diffusion of education, or even without them,
he negro must take his place on equal terms in the American political
and social system. This theory, of course, requires an absolute reversal
of attitude upon the part of many millions of whites.

Color and race prejudice are stubborn things, and California and South
Africa are no more free from such prejudices than the Southern States.
In fact, South Africa is today wrestling with a problem much like that
of the United States and is succeeding no better in solving it. The
movement of negroes to the North and West, if continued on any large
scale, seems likely to mean simply the diffusion of the problem and not
its solution.

CHAPTER VIII

EDUCATIONAL PROGRESS

Apologists for Reconstruction have repeatedly asserted that the
Reconstruction governments gave to the South a system of public schools
unknown up to that time, with the implication that this boon more than
compensated for the errors of those years. The statement has been so
often made, and by some who should have known better, that it has
generally been accepted at its face value. The status of public
education in the South in 1860, it is true, was not satisfactory, and
the percentage of illiteracy was high. Any attempt to distract attention
from these facts by pointing out the great proportion of the Southern
white population in colleges and academies is as much to be deprecated
as the denial of the existence of public schools at all.[1]

[Footnote 1: Some States had done little for public schools before 1860,
but others had made more than a respectable beginning. Delaware
established