This interest, however, except in the cities, takes the form of state aid rather than local taxation. Cities can aid themselves, for the urban public opinion is organized in a corporate form. Moreover, self-protection from the results of illiteracy becomes a conscious motive in the public opinion of a dense population. But the rural population of the South far exceeds that in the cities.
This is the strong ground on which the demand for national aid for education is urged. It is not for urban but for rural populations which will not assess local taxes sufficient to maintain schools of a suitable grade of excellence or adequate length of annual session. In this matter, it is the urban population everywhere that possesses the wealth, and can afford local taxation sufficient for education. In the State of Massachusetts, the value of the land held for building lots and urban purposes surpasses the value of the land held solely for agriculture in the ratio of ten to one, as may be seen by the data of the census taken by Hon. Carroll D. Wright for 1885.
The three symbols of our most advanced civilization are the railroad, the morning newspaper, and the school. The rural population everywhere is backward in its sympathies for these "moderns." The good school is the instrumentality which must precede in order to create this sympathy. But the good school will not spring up of itself in the agricultural community. It must be provided for by the urban influence of the State and nation. By judicious distribution of general funds, coupled with provisions requiring local taxation as a condition of sharing in these funds, even the rural districts may be brought up to the standard. The State as a whole gains in wealth and in the priceless increase of individual ability by education.
It was revealed by the census of 1880 that the colored race furnished a disproportionate share of illiterates even in the Northern and Pacific group of States. In the Northern group the percentage of colored illiterates was nearly five times as large as the percentage of white illiterates,—sixteen per cent for the colored, and three and a third per cent for the white. In the Pacific group the same disproportion prevailed. In the Southern section of the colored population of the ages of fifteen to twenty years the illiterates amounted to sixty-seven per cent, while the white illiterates were only seventeen per cent of their quota; colored illiterates from ten to fourteen were seventy per cent, and the white thirty per cent, of their respective quotas.
The illiterate person is apt to be intolerant and full of race prejudice, and to this cause we may attribute the larger portion of the feuds[1] between the races wherever they have existed in the South. But the worst feature of illiteracy is to be found in the fact that it is impenetrable to the influence of the newspaper. Enlightened public opinion depends so much on the daily newspaper that it is not possible without it; and lacking this, an ideal self-government is not to be thought of.
The most advanced form of government is that by public opinion. This is essentially a newspaper form of government. The extension of the railroad system into all parts of the South will carry the urban influence to the towns and villages; every station being a radiating centre for the daily newspapers of the metropolis. The education that comes from the daily survey of the events of the world, and a deliberate consideration of the opinions and verdicts editorially written in view of these events, is a supplement or extension of the school. It takes the place of the village gossip which once furnished the mental food
- ↑ The feuds spring almost wholly from the enmity of the whites. The negroes generally stand for the lamb drinking below and muddying the stream above. L. H. B.
