Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/549

Rh personality gravitate through urgency of demand to the great centers. Moreover, the abnormal conservatism of the south, both political and religious, creates an atmosphere antagonistic to the finer interests of scholars.

Superficially speaking, liberal training is an unimportant factor in the problem of general education; it is the elementary school that counts. But here again we find a deplorable contrast between the south and other parts of the country. In 1900 the average length of the school year in the southern states was but 109 days, the average expenditure per pupil $9.72. In the north central states—new states, many of them—the average expenditure per pupil was $20.85. We must remember, too, in connection with these statistics, that the border states, such as Maryland and Tennessee, bring up the average enormously. In North Carolina 'school kept' but a fraction over seventy days, and the expenditure per pupil was $4.34. In Alabama, though the school year was eight days longer, the expenditure per pupil was but $3.10, and so small is the enrolment through the southern states, that at the Conference for Education in the South held in 1901, the average number of school days per child was given as three a year. Be it remembered, too, that these children, the men and women of to-morrow, thus on starvation rations scholastically, are without other means to relieve their necessities. There are no 'vacation schools,' no lectures, no libraries, one might almost say no books passing from hand to hand. They are without the stimulus of contact either with active life or with a considerable number of well-educated people; and as they grow to maturity they are too often without occupation, except of the most restricted and uneducative kind. According to Mr. Walter H. Page, the proportion of illiterate white voters in the ten cis-Mississippi southern states is to-day as large as it was in 1850. That is to say, in all these years of marvelous educational development in other parts of the country, and in which even the black, just out of slavery, has so progressed, the southern white has not gained; indeed, he has lost, since he staggers to-day under the incubus of half a century of apathy. We are accustomed to take the 27 per cent, of the census as representing the illiteracy of the old slave states, but that is a very incomplete measure. At least an additional 25 per cent, can do no more than read and write, and the upper level of intellectual equipment and efficiency is below that of the corresponding classes in other parts of the country. Yet upon these men and women devolves the most critical and complicated social problem ever given to a community to solve, one demanding above all else that it be seen clearly and seen whole, and requiring for its solution nothing less than statesmanlike