ery
Afro-American agitator, stirring the strife in which alone he prospers,
I can show you a thousand negroes, happy in their cabin homes, tilling
their own land by day, and at night taking from the lips of their
children the helpful message their State sends them from the schoolhouse
door. And the schoolhouse itself bears testimony. In Georgia we added
last year $250,000 to the school fund, making a total of more than
$1,000,000--and this in the face of prejudice not yet conquered--of the
fact that the whites are assessed for $368,000,000, the blacks for
$10,000,000, and yet forty-nine per cent of the beneficiaries are black
children; and in the doubt of many wise men if education helps, or can
help, our problem. Charleston, with her taxable values cut half in two
since 1860, pays more in proportion for public schools than Boston.
Although it is easier to give much out of much than little out of
little, the South, with one-seventh of the taxable property of the
country, with relatively larger debt, having received only one-twelfth
as much of public lands, and having back of its tax books none of the
$500,000,000 of bonds that enrich the North--and though it pays annually
$26,000,000 to your section as pensions--yet gives nearly one-sixth to
the public school fund. The South since 1865 has spent $122,000,000 in
education, and this year is pledged to $32,000,000 more for State and
city schools, although the blacks, paying one-thirtieth of the taxes,
get nearly one-half of the fund. Go into our fields and see whites and
blacks working side by side. On our buildings in the same squad. In our
shops at the same forge. Often the blacks crowd the whites from work, or
lower wages by their greater need and simpler habits, and yet are
permitted, because we want to bar them from no avenue in which their
feet are fitted to tread. They could not there be elected orators of
white universities, as they have been here, but they do enter there a
hundred useful trades that are closed against them here. We hold it
better and wiser to tend the weeds in the garden than to water the
exotic in the window.

In the South there are negro lawyers, teachers, editors, dentists,
doctors, preachers, multiplying with the increasing ability of their
race to support them. In villages and towns they have their military
companies equipped from the armories of the State, their churches and
societies built and supported largely by their neighbors. What is t