INVENTION AND INDUSTRY AT THE SOUTH. 389 



world to confer a degree upon a woman. The higher education 

 of females was undertaken at an early date in Georgia, and the 

 Georgia Female Institute, opened in 1839, is believed to have pre- 

 ceded both Oberlin and Mount Holyoke in granting degrees to 

 women. Of late years there has been a marked improvement in 

 the number and character of educational institutions of all sorts 

 in the South, but the most significant change is in the number of 

 technological schools, scarcely one of which was in existence twenty 

 years ago. Prof. Dabney quotes the reports of the United States 

 Bureau of Education for 1888 and 1889, which show that there 

 were at that time " a total of twenty-eight schools, or departments 

 of schools, giving regular instruction in science and technology, 

 an average of over two for each State." If the list of patents 

 taken out by residents of the different States for the past century 

 shows that the South has been considerably behind in the race, 

 the more recent statistics are suggestive of a different result in the 

 near future. The following figures give the number of patents 

 granted residents of the Southern States for the years named: 

 1860, 6G7 ; 1870, 1,469 ; 1880, 2,656 ; 1885, 1,633 ; 1890, 3,159. 



If it be asked what in the future will be the effect of negro 

 labor and the race problem on the South, the answer is that there 

 will be no negro labor and no race problem, for the very good 

 reason that there will be no negro there. This will doubtless 

 strike the average reader as a bold and perhaps absurd predic- 

 tion, but every circumstance points to its fulfillment. The idea is 

 by no means new, and Jefferson, probably the profoundest political 

 philosopher of his country, a strong opponent of slavery, and it 

 should be added a resident of a slaveholding State, and whose 

 knowledge of the institution was actual, not theoretical, long ago 

 gave this as his opinion. He asserted that nothing was more cer- 

 tainly written in the book of fate than that the negro was to be 

 free, and he added that it was equally certain that when free the 

 two races would not continue to live side by side. This was also 

 the view of Calhoun, who, while unlike Jefferson a proslavery 

 man, held his opinion as regards the impossibility of the two races 

 continuing together after emancipation. The industrial condi- 

 tions of the South at present point clearly to the realization of 

 these prophecies at a period not far distant. We hear and talk 

 much of the conflict between capital and labor. We forget that 

 the real conflict is not between capital and labor, but between 

 labor and labor. No race has ever stood in the way of the Anglo- 

 Saxon in his onward march, and it is not probable that the negro 

 race, among the lowest in the scale of civilization, is to be the 

 sole exception to that rule. As the poor white of the South, re- 

 enforced by the laborer from the North, enters more and more 

 into the field as a competitor with the negro, the latter will meet 



