his
training should be judiciously adapted and sensibly applied to his
needs. Industrial training will supply the method and the higher
culture the motive.

Professor Straton tells us that $100,000,000 have already been
expended upon the education of this race. Princely as this sum seems
to be, it is nevertheless utterly insignificant when compared with the
magnitude of the task to which it has been applied. The city of New
York alone spends $15,000,000 annually for educational purposes. And
yet if we are to believe the rumors of corruption and the low state of
municipal morality it will be seen that education has not yet done its
perfect work in our great metropolis. Then why should we rave at the
heart and froth at the mouth because a sum of money, scarcely equal to
a third of the educational expenditure of a single American city,
though distributed over a period of thirty years and scattered over a
territory of a million square miles, has not completely civilized a
race of 8,000,000 degraded souls?

The whites maintain that they impose taxes upon themselves for the
education of the blacks. This is only one of the many false notions of
political economy which have done so much to blight the prosperity of
the South. Labor pays every tax in the world; and although the laborer
may not enjoy the privilege of passing the tribute to the tax taker,
he is nevertheless entitled to share in all of the privileges which
his toil makes possible. And besides children are not educated because
their parents are taxpayers, but in order that they may become more
helpful and efficient members of the community. It would be wisdom on
the part of the South to place the future generations under bonded
debt, if necessary, for the education of its ignorant population,
white and black. This would be far more statesmanlike than to transmit
to them a legacy of ignorance, degradation and crime. Pride in a
political theory should no longer prevent the appeal to national aid
to remove the threatening curse.

Professor Straton underestimates the effect of culture upon a backward
race when he minimizes the value of individual emergence. The
individual is the proof of the race. The conception of progress has
always found lodgment in the mind of some select individuals, whence
it has trickled down to the masses below. May it not be that the races
which have withered before the breath of civilization, have faded
because they failed to produce indivi