THE EDUCATION OF THE COLORED RACE 461 



may enjoy the suffrage while the lower (the poor and illiterate) section 

 of the white race is excluded therefrom. Thereby equal political rights 

 are given to all. The southern states have thus through their own 

 councils put into practise the very ideas that an unbiased writer, the 

 great English political scientist and statesman, the Hon. James Bryce, 

 advocated in his Eomanes lecture, delivered at Oxford, June 7, 1902. 

 By putting himself in this upper section, and not before then, can a 

 colored man enjoy all the privileges of an American citizen. It re- 

 mains that educational facilities be given him to accomplish this end. 

 We claim that it is a primary duty of the federal government to aid 

 the natives of its own states in becoming good citizens and that the 

 " moral obligations " of this country must be first exercised within its 

 own domains. 



It has been shown above that the great masses of colored people 

 live in rural districts. The Twelfth Census of the United States, Vol. 

 V., pp. xciii, 4, 127, shows that in 1900 there were 732,362 farms oper- 

 ated by negroes in the south; that 150,000 southern negroes 9 owned 

 their farms and that 28,000 more were part-owners. This shows a 

 marked progress on the part of the negro farmer since the war. 



It is clear that a good farmer increases the value of his own farm, 

 and a good farm increases the value of the adjoining farms. Hence 

 country property advances directly as the advance in intelligence of the 

 agricultural laborer, and the advance in the intelligence of this laborer 

 is made directly through the education of his children. Thus educa- 

 tion makes labor more effective and thereby enhances the value of all 

 farming lands. Viewed from its moral aspect, statistics have already 

 been collected sufficient to show that the literate negroes are the least 

 criminal. 10 It is practically axiomatic that among people closely iden- 

 tified the betterment of one race must also uplift the other, while the 

 deterioration of the one must retard the progress of the other; and that 

 either condition has a direct effect upon the nation at large. The 

 danger of any commonwealth lies not in the education of any one class, 

 but rather in the degeneracy of that class through lack of education; 

 and the peril of the south is not in the rise and progress of the negro, 

 but in his total downfall. 11 



9 Booker T. Washington (Tradesman, Chattanooga, January 1, 1904, p. 99) 

 claims almost double this number. 



10 Cf., for example, Clarence A. Poe, of Raleigh, N. C, in The Atlantic 

 Monthly, February, 1904. 



11 It is easy to show the fallacy of an apprehension entertained by some 

 people that the entire population of this country urill eventually be "negroid." 

 For suppose, as an extreme case, that five per cent, of the colored population 

 were mulattoes (one half black, one half white) ; i. e., 19 blacks to one mulatto. 

 (The true percentage is much smaller than the one assumed, which makes the 

 hypothesis much in favor of the negroid proposition.) These mulattoes having 



