ldren when five or six years of age to
mingle in schools together and associate generally. Under such training,
prejudice must eventually die out; but if we postpone it until they
become men and women, prejudice will be so established that no mortal
can obliterate it. This, I think, is a sufficient reply to the argument
of the gentleman."

The state systems were top-heavy with administrative machinery and were
officered by incompetent and corrupt officials. Such men as Cloud in
Alabama, Cardozo in Mississippi, Conway in Louisiana, and Jillson in
South Carolina are fair samples of them. Much of the personnel was taken
over from the Bureau teaching force. The school officials were no better
than the other officeholders.

The first result of the attempt to use the schools as an instrument
of reconstruction ended in the ruin of several state universities.
The faculties of the Universities of North Carolina, Mississippi, and
Alabama were made radical and the institutions thereupon declined to
nothing. The Negroes, unable to control the faculty of the University
of South Carolina, forced Negro students in and thus got possession.
In Louisiana the radical legislature cut off all funds because the
university would not admit Negroes. The establishment of the land grant
colleges was an occasion for corruption and embezzlement.

The common schools were used for radical ends. The funds set aside for
them by the state constitutions or appropriated by the legislatures for
these schools seldom reached their destination without being lessened
by embezzlement or by plain stealing. Frequently the auditor, or the
treasurer, or even the legislature diverted the school funds to other
purposes. Suffice it to say that all of the reconstruction systems broke
down financially after a brief existence.

The mixed school provisions in Louisiana and South Carolina and the
uncertainty of the educational situation in other States caused white
children to stay away from the public schools. For several years the
Negroes were better provided than the whites, having for themselves both
all the public schools and also those supported by private benevolence.
In Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina the whites could get no
money for schoolhouses, while large sums were spent on Negro schools.
The Peabody Board, then recently inaugurated,* refused to cooperate
with school officials in the mixed school states and, when criticized,
replied: "It is well