The average school year throughout the South, in 1880, was less than
one hundred days; the average attendance less than thirty per cent. of
those within school age. In a belt of States where seventy-three per
cent., and probably ninety per cent., of the population are
illiterate, where they are too poor to do much except keep up the
struggle for existence, where there are no traditions of culture,
where it has been a crime for a black man to read, where the Nation is
doing nothing, and where the State, when it does its best, provides
instruction which reaches only thirty per cent. of those of school age
for one hundred days in a year, and where the population is increasing
so rapidly that in 1900 the blacks will be in a decided majority,
charity and religion are doing--what? The progress under the
circumstances is amazing, but how long will it take to educate the
nineteen per cent. of Southern whites, and seventy-three per cent., of
Southern blacks? There is more illiteracy now than at the close of the
war, because education has not kept pace with the increase of the
race.

V. How long will be required for the _moralizing_ of the lower classes
of the South? Ability to make moral discriminations grows slowly.
Ability to appreciate moral motives grows still more slowly. These
people were trained in a school in which virtue was ignored. They have
lived under conditions which have put a premium on theft. Slavery
always makes thieves. The heredity of the passion for stealing is just
as clearly marked as the heredity of the Roman nose or the faculty for
music. The transmission of the tendency toward the gratification of
the animal propensities is as definite as, and stronger than, the
tendency for insanity and consumption to reproduce themselves. These
people come into life blind, {127} and find little but darkness around
them. Here you have about eight millions with an ancestry which began