Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/52

42 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 attend, 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 themselves 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 Caucasian, 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, fortunately 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 reasoning 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 purpose, 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. Consequently 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 consequence that the young African, as soon as he finds himself capable of self-support, quits forever the paternal roof which appears to him precisely as slavehood appeared to his ancestors.