f some
communities to the suicidal results of this policy.

It is the public schools, however, which can be made, outside the
homes, the greatest means of training decent self-respecting citizens.
We have been so hotly engaged recently in discussing trade-schools and
the higher education that the pitiable plight of the public-school
system in the South has almost dropped from view. Of every five
dollars spent for public education in the State of Georgia, the white
schools get four dollars and the Negro one dollar; and even then the
white public-school system, save in the cities, is bad and cries for
reform. If this is true of the whites, what of the blacks? I am
becoming more and more convinced, as I look upon the system of
common-school training in the South, that the national government must
soon step in and aid popular education in some way. To-day it has been
only by the most strenuous efforts on the part of the thinking men of
the South that the Negro's share of the school fund has not been cut
down to a pittance in some half-dozen States; and that movement not
only is not dead, but in many communities is gaining strength. What in
the name of reason does this nation expect of a people, poorly trained
and hard pressed in severe economic competition, without political
rights, and with ludicrously inadequate common-school facilities? What
can it expect but crime and listlessness, offset here and there by the
dogged struggles of the fortunate and more determined who are
themselves buoyed by the hope that in due time the country will come to
its senses?

I have thus far sought to make clear the physical, economic, and
political relations of the Negroes and whites in the South, as I have
conceived them, including, for the reasons set forth, crime and
education. But after all that has been said on these more tangible
matters of human contact, there still remains a part essential to a
proper description of the South which it is difficult to describe or
fix in terms easily understood by strangers. It is, in fine, the
atmosphere of the land, the thought and feeling, the thousand and one
little actions which go to make up life. In any community or nation it
is these little things which are most elusive to the grasp and yet most
essential to any clear conception of the group life taken as a whole.
What is thus true of all communities is peculiarly true of the South,
where, outside of written history and outside of p