of one class and the inferiority of another, might easily
have disastrous, rather than beneficial results. It would render the
oppressing class more powerful to injure, the oppressed quicker to
perceive and keener to resent the injury, without proportionate power of
defense. The same assimilative education which is given at the North to
all children alike, whereby native and foreign, black and white, are
taught side by side in every grade of instruction, and are compelled by
the exigencies of discipline to keep their prejudices in abeyance, and
are given the opportunity to learn and appreciate one another's good
qualities, and to establish friendly relations which may exist
throughout life, is absent from the Southern system of education, both
of the past and as proposed for the future. Education is in a broad
sense a remedy for all social ills; but the disease we have to deal with
now is not only constitutional but acute. A wise physician does not
simply give a tonic for a diseased limb, or a high fever; the patient
might be dead before the constitutional remedy could become effective.
The evils of slavery, its injury to whites and blacks, and to the body
politic, were clearly perceived and acknowledged by the educated leaders
of the South as far back as the Revolutionary War and the Constitutional
Convention, and yet they made no effort to abolish it. Their remedy was
the same--time, education, social and economic development;--and yet a
bloody war was necessary to destroy slavery and put its spirit
temporarily to sleep. When the South and its friends are ready to
propose a system of education which will recognize and teach the
equality of all men before the law, the potency of education alone to
settle the race problem will be more clearly apparent.

At present even good Northern men, who wish to educate the Negroes, feel
impelled to buy this privilege from the none too eager white South, by
conceding away the civil and political rights of those whom they would
benefit. They have, indeed, gone farther than the Southerners themselves
in approving the disfranchisement of the colored race. Most Southern
men, now that they have carried their point and disfranchised the Negro,
are willing to admit, in the language of a recent number of the
Charleston _Evening Post_, that "the attitude of the Southern white man
toward the Negro is incompatible with the fundamental ideas of the
republic." It remained for our Clevelands and A