a state of
cruel bondage with little of this world's goods that constitute
capital; with few of those incentives to labor that universally are
requisites to the full and free development of labor and capital. The
knowledge the Negro had of agriculture, of domestic life, and in some
cases, his high-grade mechanical skill, gave him something of a
vantage ground, but for nearly two hundred and fifty years he had been
so "worked" that it would be expecting too much to demand that he at
once comprehend the true dignity of labor. Nor was it to be expected
that to his untutored mind freedom and work were terms to be
intimately associated. Then there was a certain amount of
constitutional inertia to be overcome, a natural heritage of the
native of a tropical or semi-tropical climate, but quite incompatible
with the fierce competition of American civilization, or with the
material conditions of a people who owned in the entire country forty
years ago, only a few thousand dollars; and among whom education was
limited to the favored few whose previous estate either of freedom,
or by other propitious circumstance, had rendered its acquisition
possible. Organizations for business enterprise or any purpose of
reform and advancement, outside of the Northern cities, was
practically unknown.

Evidently one of the first things to be done by which the Negro could
be reconstructed and become an intelligent member of society was to
educate him; teach him to provide for himself; making him more
provident and painstaking; teaching him self-reliance and
self-control; teaching him the value of time, of money, and the
intimate relationship of the two. Certainly not a light task. These
lessons could only be learned in the practical school of experience,
then, not in a day. And what has been accomplished? Forty years ago
there was not in the entire Southland a single Negro school; before
the close of the nineteenth century there were twenty thousand Negro
school houses, thirty thousand Negro teachers, and three million Negro
school children happily wending their way to the "Pierian Spring."

Under the "system," generally speaking, it had been considered a crime
to teach the Negro to read or write; and the census of 1870 shows that
only two-tenths of all the Negroes of the United States, over ten
years of age, could write. Ten years later, the proportion had
increased to three-tenths of the whole number; while in 1890 only a
generation after em