hree per cent., of
Southern blacks? There is more illiteracy now than at the close of the
war, because education has not kept pace with the increase of the
race.

V. How long will be required for the _moralizing_ of the lower classes
of the South? Ability to make moral discriminations grows slowly.
Ability to appreciate moral motives grows still more slowly. These
people were trained in a school in which virtue was ignored. They have
lived under conditions which have put a premium on theft. Slavery
always makes thieves. The heredity of the passion for stealing is just
as clearly marked as the heredity of the Roman nose or the faculty for
music. The transmission of the tendency toward the gratification of
the animal propensities is as definite as, and stronger than, the
tendency for insanity and consumption to reproduce themselves. These
people come into life blind, {127} and find little but darkness around
them. Here you have about eight millions with an ancestry which began
in heathenism and has had two centuries of slavery--a people
inheriting all the evils of slavery; a people who have never been
trained to make moral discriminations, and whose ancestors for unknown
generations have been trained still less than they; a people who have
none, or at least but little, of the inspiration toward a higher moral
life which comes from a healthy environment; a people whose religion
is almost all emotional; who can soar on the wings of imagination and
enthusiasm to heights which would make an archangel dizzy; who from
paroxysms of anguish at the condition of those whose burning bodies
are lighting the fires of hell, will go off and commit adultery or rob
a hen-roost as complacently as if to do so were a part of their
religion. This is not fiction. Religion has not meant chastity, for
slavery made that impossible; it has not meant justice, for injustice
forged their chains; it has not meant generosity, for they had
nothing; it has been simple emotion. The ethical element has been
absent, and it was through no fault of the black man.

In 1860, President Hopkins said that a greater proportion of the
Sandwich Islanders could read than of the people in New England. They
were educated but not moralized. There were three hundred thousand of
them a century and a half ago; in 1883, there were forty-nine
thousand. Education without morality is no safeguard.

Prof. Gilliam shows, from census reports, that if the population of
the Sout