ever had been inside a school-house, and who didn't
mean to 'low their children to go inside one. In the upper part of South
Carolina, I stopped one night at the house of a moderately well-to-do
farmer who never had owned any book but a Testament, and that was given
to him. When I expressed some surprise at this fact, he assured me that
he was as well off as some other people thereabouts. Between Augusta and
Milledgeville I rode in a stage-coach in which were two delegates of the
Georgia Convention. When I said that I hoped the day would soon come in
which school-houses would be as numerous in Georgia as in Massachusetts,
one of them answered: "Well, I hope it'll never come,--popular education
is all a d--n humbug in my judgment"; whereunto the other responded,
"That's my opinion, too." These are exceptional cases, I am aware, but
they truly index the situation of thousands of persons. It is this
general ignorance, and this general indifference to knowledge, that make
a Southern trip such wearisome work. You can touch the masses with few
of the appeals by which we move our own people. There is very little
aspiration for larger life; and, more than that, there is almost no
opportunity for its attainment. That education is the stairway to a
nobler existence is a fact which they either fail to comprehend or to
which they are wholly indifferent.

Where there is such a spirit of caste, where the ruling class has a
personal interest in fostering prejudice, where the masses are in such
an inert condition, where ignorance so generally prevails, where there
is so little ambition for improvement, where life is so hard and
material in its tone, it is not strange to find much hatred and
contempt. Ignorance is generally cruel, and frequently brutal. The
political leaders of this people have apparently indoctrinated them with
the notion that they are superior to any other class in the country.
Hence there is usually very little effort to conceal the prevalent scorn
of the Yankee,--this term being applied to the citizen of any Northern
State. Any plan of reconstruction is wrong that tends to leave these old
leaders in power. A few of them give fruitful evidence of a change of
heart,--by some means save these for the sore and troubled future; but
for the others, the men who not only brought on the war, but ruined the
mental and moral force of their people before unfurling the banner of
rebellion,--for these there should never any more b