, and profit by it, is
another indication of their capacity for advancement. True, there is
still an appalling illiteracy among them, some 70 per cent. of them in
the South being unable to write. But we must remember that hardly a
quarter of a century ago it was a crime to teach one of them to read;
they were sedulously kept in compulsory ignorance, and since the ban was
removed, poverty, lack of schools and teachers, and other causes have
prevented their advancement as rapidly as we may expect in future. But
much has been done for them in this particular. Dr. Haygood estimates
that about $50,000,000 has been spent for the education of the Negro
since the war, nearly half of which has come from the benevolence of the
North. Through the American Missionary Association alone some
$10,000,000 has gone into the school and church work for the Negro, both
alike educational. There are some 200 schools carried on in the South by
different benevolent organizations, having over 28,000 colored youth in
them. Of these, ninety are colleges or high schools, and furnish
teachers and educated leaders for this race. Three-quarters of a million
dollars a year flows southward from Northern generosity to this work.
And besides this, is the work being done by the South itself for the
colored youth in its public schools. A million Negroes are in the 15,000
colored schools of the South to-day, being taught by 15,000 teachers of
their own color, the best of whom have been educated in these schools
nurtured by Northern benevolence. And what is the result? The illiteracy
in this race diminished 10 per cent. between 1870 and 1880, showing the
eagerness of the people for improvement. It is estimated that two
millions of the blacks can now read the Bible for themselves. And the
universities for higher education find the Negro as susceptible to the
best culture, as capable of receiving thorough discipline and of being
highly educated as the white boys and girls in our Northern colleges.
The time is not far distant when colored college graduates, instead of
being reckoned by hundreds as now, will be numbered by thousands, and
when we shall see some Mark Hopkins in ebony.

The time has gone by when intelligent men can talk about the inferiority
of this race. When representative Southern men declare that they were
mistaken in their former view, when such men as ex-Governor Brown, of
Georgia, convinced by the examinations of our Atlanta University,
publ