42 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in the matter of taxes. In the sparsely settled districts the amount of 

 annual tax (limited to five mills) will permit of but one school, and 

 that with a session of not more than four or five months each year, 

 and herein lies the trouble. The black directors, knowing that but 

 one school can be maintained, are willing to employ a white teacher 

 and call it a white school provided their children are allowed to at- 

 tend, or they will make it a black school, and white children may share 

 the advantages. White prejudices, which none but a Southerner can 

 understand or appreciate, render each of these offers unacceptable and 

 repulsive, and it is difficult to blame the freedmen that they avail them- 

 selves of the power which the law has given them, and employ colored 

 teachers. Things may be better regulated after a while ; in the mean 

 time the negroes are gradually acquiring education, while in many 

 places the whites remain without schooling, or with but little. 



If the African brain were as large and as active as that of the Cau- 

 casian, the result of this condition of affairs could be easily calculated, 

 for, notwithstanding the preponderance of authority which centuries of 

 domination have given to the white race, it is much to be doubted if 

 the conditions would not be reversed if, with equal natural capacity, 

 an educated colored race should oppose illiterate whites ; but, fortu- 

 nately for the latter, two things stand in the way of such absolute 

 subversion of positions : First, it is indisputable that, as a race, the 

 African is inferior to the Caucasian in intelligent comprehensive rea- 

 soning and constructive power, and it would require something besides 

 mere intellectual improvement to bring the former up to the level of 

 the latter. Second, the colored man has to-day a strong desire that 

 his children shall be educated, though he is willing to make but few 

 personal sacrifices for that object. To be sure, he votes taxes for the 

 purj)ose, but, as he pays his proportion indirectly, he does not feel 

 them. The desire is entirely predominated by his determination that 

 they shall, at as early an age as possible, become workers, and thereby 

 relieve his shoulders of a large part of his necessary labor. Conse- 

 quently he is unwilling to allow much time to schools. So soon as the 

 child is able to wield a hoe he is regarded a fractional field-hand, and 

 during the cotton-picking season quite a large fraction. He knows 

 nothing, it is not in his nature to know anything, of that vigorous 

 Anglo-Saxon determination which, under the circumstances described, 

 cheerfully pays the school-tax, and then makes personal sacrifices in 

 order that the children may be sent to some pay-school. The desire 

 of the African parent that his child shall work is so strong that it is 

 safe to say that, with few exceptions, the young negroes of to-day, 

 especially those on farms, live under more severe rules as to labor than 

 their fathers did while children in slavery, with the reasonable conse- 

 quence that the young African, as soon as he finds himself capable of 

 self-support, quits forever the paternal roof which appears to him pre- 

 cisely as slavehood appeared to his ancestors. 



