EDUCATIONAL ENDOWMENTS IN THE SOUTH. 547 



trine that to be known bj your neighbors is a liberal education, 

 the attempts at schooling in the later sixties and early seventies 

 presented many picturesque variations from the usual type. The 

 early morning hours would see sedate horses bestridden by from three 

 to five children each making their way into town to deposit their load 

 at a dame school, sometimes a dame school of delicate and antiquated 

 refinement, and sometimes one of a rather hot-handed domesticity, 

 where the boys were cuffed through geography and fractions. These 

 schools sprang usually from the teacher's need instead of from her 

 at^ility; almost invariably was she without professional training and 

 without educational standards, and too often even without anv but the 

 most meager schooling. Such institutions quite deserved the prac- 

 tical disregard in which they were held. Their potent influence — for 

 they exercised one — was not upon the reluctant children within their 

 walls, but upon the community without, for whom they alone repre- 

 sented learning, knowledge, the great society of scholars. It was with 

 such educational standards, perhaps we should say also such educational 

 habits, as these that the generation born just after the war grew up; 

 they knew such schools or none at all; and it was not tlie child of the 

 poor white alone who depended upon them, but the children of all 

 classes, outside of the chief cities. For many a year after the close 

 of the civil war the shrunken and disheveled libraries lay neglected 

 in the dignified old houses; other cares than those of literature 

 absorbed their owners and their owners' sons and daughters. The 

 res angustae domi were studied at first hand, instead of through 

 the medium of Latin authors, and it was full twenty years after, in 

 many cases, before the ruling group of people, even in many of the 

 most favored parts of the south, sent a son to a college of exacting 

 standard and liberal equipment. Their daughters they are hardly 

 sending even now. It is the men and women of that bereft generation, 

 shorn of the family distinction of the past, lacking the discipline of 

 the civil war itself, so royally met by so many southern men and 

 women, and growing up with little or no education wlio are now in 

 the saddle. Is not this the key to many of the lamentable social con- 

 ditions in the south to-day? Is the persistent medievalism of thought 

 any but a logical outcome? 



In so comprehensive a range of needs it would seem difficult to 

 single out any as specially vital, and it is true that educational endow- 

 ment for the so^^th can hardly go amiss. But there are certain strategic 

 points which it is especially desirable to gain. The first of these is the 

 development of industrial training. For many a year to come, if not 

 for many a generation, the south must be essentially a rural population, 

 and if the dormant mind is to be reached, it must be through the things 

 with which it is in daily contact. One of the ways to dignify labor is to 



