Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/335

Rh bounds of political liberty, enhanced the nation's wealth, and contributed so largely to its power?

It, however, is further claimed, and almost universally allowed, that the instruction of our public schools serves to ennoble the emotions and to moderate the passions, to regenerate the viciously inclined, and to correct and subdue the tendency to crime. Devoutly as such a result is to be desired, the facts unhappily flatly contradict the theory, and unless the glaring inconsistencies are reconciled, and contravening evidence is satisfactorily explained, the claim must be abandoned as unfounded.

At a session of the National Prison Congress, held in Boston during 1888, Mr. Brooker, chairman of the Board of Directors of the South Carolina Penitentiary, having made the statement that of a thousand convicts in the State not more than fifty were whites, it was asked by a delegate, "What is the condition of the education of the colored people?" To this question Mr. Brooker made the following reply: "Before emancipation, the colored people had no opportunity for education. When made suddenly free, all negroes were illiterate and ignorant. Since that time a young generation has grown up, and of them a very considerable number are well educated. But it is a fearful fact that a large proportion of our prison population is of the educated class. This is so much the case that the idea has become prevalent that to educate the negro is to make him a rascal. But this idea is of course superficial, and does not find lodgment in the minds of thoughtful men. I am totally averse to it myself, and think that all reasonable means should be exerted toward their enlightenment and education." ("Proceedings of the National Prison Association" 1888, p. 72.)

The constructing engineer is to our industrial, commercial, and mechanical development all that the statesman and student of sociology is to our moral, social, and political progress. If in a convention of engineers a verified report had been made that bridges of accepted form were showing visible signs of weakness, the report would have been listened to with the greatest consternation and dismay. The convention would have instituted the closest inquiry and most searching examinations; it would have stopped the construction of such bridges until the causes of failure had been determined and the remedy ascertained, and failing in this the construction of such bridges would have been permanently abandoned and more perfect structures substituted.

But here was the most astounding fact that in South Carolina, which in 1880 had more than half its population returned as illiterate, the educated negroes furnished a large proportion of its criminals, pressed upon a representative body of philanthropists, publicists, and statesmen, and it did not so much as provoke