EDUCATIONAL ENDOWMENTS IN THE SOUTH. 545 



personality gravitate through urgency of demand to the great centers. 

 JMoreover, the abnormal conservatism of the south, both political and 

 religious, creates an atmos])here antagonistic to the finer interests of 

 scholars. 



Superficially speaking, liberal training is an unimportant factor in 

 the problem of general education; it is the elementary school that 

 counts. But here again we find a deplorable contrast between the 

 south and other parts of the country. In 1900 the average length of 

 the school year in the southern states was but 109 days, the average 

 expenditure per pupil $9.72. In the north central states — new states, 

 many of them — the average expenditure per pupil was $20.85. We 

 must remember, too, in connection with these statistics, that the border 

 states, such as Maryland and Tennessee, bring up the average enor- 

 mously. In Xorth Carolina 'school kept' but a fraction over seventy 

 days, and the expenditure per pupil was $4.34. In Alabama, though 

 the school year was eight days longer, the expenditure per pupil was 

 but $3.10, and so small is the enrolment through the southern states, 

 that at the Conference for Education in the South held in 1901, the 

 average number of school days per child was given as three a year. 

 Be it remembered, too, that these children, the men and women of 

 to-morrow, thus on starvation rations scholastically, are wathout other 

 means to relieve their necessities. There are no 'vacation schools,' no 

 lectures, no libraries, one might almost say no books passing from hand 

 to hand. They are without the stimulus of contact either with active 

 life or with a considerable number of well-educated people; and as they 

 grow to maturity they are too often without occupation, except of the 

 most restricted and uneducative kind. According to Mr. Walter H. 

 Page, the proportion of illiterate white voters in the ten cis-Mississippi 

 southern states is to-day as large as it was in 1850. That is to say, in 

 all these years of marvelous educational development in other parts of 

 the country, and in which even the black, just out of slavery, has so 

 progressed, the southern white has not gained; indeed, he has lost, 

 since he staggers to-day under the incubus of half a century of apathy. 

 We are accustomed to take the 27 per cent, of the census as represent- 

 ing the illiteracy of the old slave states, but that is a very incomplete 

 measure. At least an additional 25 per cent, can do no more than 

 read and write, and the upper level of intellectual equipment and 

 efficiency is below that of the corresponding classes in other parts 

 of the country. Yet upon these men and women devolves the most 

 critical and complicated social problem ever given to a community to 

 solve, one demanding above all else that it be seen clearly and seen 

 whole, and requiring for its solution nothing less than statesmanlike 



VOL. LXIII. — 35. 



