honest ex-Confederate officer, in addressing both the Alabama and
Georgia State legislatures, say to those bodies in the most emphatic
manner that it was as much the duty of the State to educate the negro
children as the white children, and in each case Dr. Curry's words were
cheered.

Here at Snow Hill is the foundation for the solution of the legal and
political difficulties that exist in the South, and the improvement
of the industrial condition of the negro in Cuba and Porto Rico. This
solution will not come all at once, but gradually. The foundation must
exist in the commercial and industrial development of the people of my
race in the South and in the West Indian Islands.

The most intelligent whites are beginning to realize that they cannot go
much higher than they lift the negro at the same time. When a black man
owns and cultivates the best farm to be found in his county he will have
the confidence and respect of most of the white people in that county.
When a black man is the largest taxpayer in his community his white
neighbor will not object very long to his voting, and having that vote
honestly counted. Even now a black man who has five hundred dollars to
lend has no trouble in finding a white man who is willing to borrow his
money. The negro who is a large stockholder in a railroad company will
always be treated with justice on that railroad.

Many of the most intelligent colored people are learning that while
there are many bad white men in the South, there are Southern whites who
have the highest interests of the negro just as closely at heart as have
any other people in any part of the country. Many of the negroes are
learning that it is folly not to cultivate in every honorable way the
friendship of the white man who is their next-door neighbor.

To describe the work being done in connection with the public schools
by graduates of Tuskegee and other institutions in the South, at
such places as Mount Meigs, under Miss Cornelia Bowen; Denmark, South
Carolina; Abbeville and Newville, Alabama; Christiansburg, Virginia, and
numbers of other places in the Gulf States, would be only to repeat in a
larger or smaller degree what I have said of Snow Hill.

Not very long after the last national election I visited a town in the
South, to speak at a meeting which had for its object the raising of
money to complete the school-house. The audience was about equally
divided between white men and women and black me