Southern State that free
government is based upon a public common-school system_. It has taken
two decades to incorporate this public school policy upon Southern
institutions, but it has now the evidence of permanency and it is
offering to Christian philanthropy an unparalleled opportunity, such
as God seldom gives to any people, and one which should rally the
churches as never before in support of the great enterprises of the
American Missionary Association.

There has been forced upon the New South the conclusion that the best
way to increase its wealth is to increase the number of educated,
intelligent producers, and with this conclusion it realizes that it
cannot afford to let two million colored children grow up in hopeless
illiteracy. It perceives that its very institutions will be imperiled
by such a condition. I have through personal interviews with leading
educators in a recent trip through the South, by correspondence and by
a careful examination of documents and reports from nearly all the
Southern States, undertaken to find just what is being done at the
present time in the public colored schools of the South.

The significance of this public school movement will be understood
when it is remembered that the acceptance of the idea that the
constitution of a free State rests on universal education, marks a
great change in theory; that this has come against the opinions of the
old Bourbon party, which never forgets, and, it is to be feared, never
learns; whose political economy is represented by the expression,
"keep the negro down"; which regards his enfranchisment as a political
outrage and his education as a mistake and a failure; that it has
risen in the face of the poverty of the South and in the midst of its
most intense prejudices. For when the new educational movement began,
the property and a large part of the intelligence belonged to the
opponents of the new educational policy, but now, in the words of a
prominent Southern gentleman: "The conviction has become very deep
that in the altered condition of our people the only hope left us is
to do all that can be done towards elevating the masses irrespective
of race." This certainly represents a tremendous transformation.
Without stopping to trace the causes that produced it, or even the
large place the American Missionary Association work has in it, let me
simply quote from {98} a Southern Christian man, whose sympathies are
full of prejudice against