ntil intelligence, handmaid of
liberty, shall have illuminated the whole land with the
light of her smile.

Before the war the Southern States were aristocracies,
highly educated, and disciplined in the science of polities.
Hence they preserved order and flourished at home, while
they imposed their will upon the nation at large. Now all is
changed. The suffrage is universal, and that means universal
ruin unless the capacity to use it intelligently is created
by universal education. Until the republican constitutions,
framed in accordance with the Congressional reconstruction
which supplanted the governments initiated by President
Johnson, common-school systems, like universal suffrage,
were unknown. Hence in a special manner the nation is
responsible for the existence and support of those systems
as well as for the order of things which made them
necessary. That remarkable progress has been made under
their influence is true, and that the common school is fast
becoming as dear to the masses of the people at the South as
elsewhere is also evident.

The Nation, through the Freedmen's Bureau, and perhaps to a
limited extent in other ways, has expended five millions of
dollars for the education of negroes and refugees in the
earlier days of reconstruction, while religious charities
have founded many special schools which have thus far cost
some ten millions more. The Peabody fund has distilled the
dews of heaven all over the South; but heavy rains are
needed; without them every green thing must wither away.

This work belongs to the Nation. It is a part of the war.
We have the Southern people as patriotic allies now. We are
one; so shall we be forever. But both North and South have a
fiercer and more doubtful fight with the forces of ignorance
than they waged with each other during the bloody years
which chastened the opening life of this generation.

The South lost in the destruction of property about two billion
dollars and in prosecuting the war two billion more. No people can
lose so much without seriously disarranging the entire mechanism of
their government. It is for this reason, therefore, that the measure
of "National Aid to Education" has so many and so persistent
advocates. I wish to place myself among them. If the safety of
republican governme