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34 which the people availed themselves of the provision by attendance upon the schools.

The total number of colored children of school age in the late slave States was in 1882, 1,944,572, an increase of 15,385; and of those enrolled, 802,982, an increase of 610. There were for these 15,972 schools a decrease of 1,681. Besides which there were fifty-six normal schools, an increase of nine, with 8,509 pupils, an increase of 888; forty-three institutions for secondary instruction, an increase of nine, with 6,632 pupils, an increase of 1,348; eighteen universities and colleges, an increase of one, with 2,298 pupils, an increase of 95; twenty-four schools of theology, an increase of two, with 665 pupils, an increase of 61; four schools of law, an increase of one, with 53 pupils, an increase of 8; three schools of medicine, an increase of one, with 125 pupils, an increase of 9; six schools for the deaf and dumb and the blind, an increase of four, with 116 pupils, a decrease of 4; making a grand total of 16,086 schools, colleges, etc., a decrease of 1,289, with 821,380 pupils, an increase of 3,015 over those reported in 1881.

Nothing in the progress of the South since the close of the civil war is so gratifying as these exhibits of growth in educational facilities and this steady increase in the number of scholars of both races. The people of the Northern States will never be able to understand or comprehend all that it is to us of the South. All the expenses and money losses of these States during the war were represented in bonds and other forms of Government indebtedness, which were so much of addition to the property values of that section. But the Southern States lost everything—their slaves, their crops, and all the profits of their industrial efforts for five years, their public (Confederate) debt, nearly all of their railroad and steamboat property, fifty per cent of their homesteads, their farm-fences, mills, and gins, the whole representing a total value variously estimated at from $9,000,000,000 to $11,000,000,000. It was a clean sweep—so clean that both Generals Grant and Sherman found it necessary to permit the officers and privates of the Confederate armies to retain their horses and mules to make crops; and Governor Legislature in Tennessee passed an act making the stealing of a mule or a horse punishable by death, on the expressed ground that the mule and the horse were essential to the life of the people—without them bread could not be made. Following upon the heels of this utter destitution and the consequent prostration and despondency, came the period of reconstruction, which increased the confusion that prevailed, re-excited the passions of the war, and added to it all a race-feeling that for a time was at a white heat—a feeling that was a new experience to the people of the South. Out of this extreme of general poverty, out of this race-feeling and political passion and prejudice, order was slowly evoked, and with it came the steady growth of a healthy public sentiment favorable first to public education and then to the education of the negro.