Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/550

546 methods, a wide social philosophy and the finest ethical feeling translated into terms of democracy.

What are the reasons for these lamentable and even tragic conditions? First, certainly, are those so often noted—poverty and a scanty population. The proportions of area and school population might be placed at forty children per square mile in Rhode Island and forty square miles per child in Florida—a condition which gives the former commonwealth an advantage in developing a system of public schools. But back of this and back of the terrible losses of the civil war lies another which has made the first two effective for harm—heretofore the south has not desired any general development of education within her borders. At the time that John Eliot in Massachusetts was praying, 'Lord, for schools everywhere among us,' Governor Berkeley of Virginia, in answer to an inquiry from England, was writing, 'I thank God there are no free schools nor printing presses; God keep us from both.'

William and Mary made a promising beginning. It was established as a school for the Virginia people and the Indians, with an endowment munificent when compared with that of Harvard and Yale at that time. "But," to quote a southern educator, "the idea that education was not for the masses did not die an easy death in Virginia; and William and Mary was never a people's school in the sense that Harvard and Yale were. * * * The years following the Revolution saw the defeat of every plan for universal education. Most of the provisions were merely permissive, and the whole atmosphere was antagonistic. The noble plan of Jefferson was too liberal to be even proposed in its entirety, and the part which was made public was so mutilated in the process of adoption that it became an object of contempt."

At the outbreak of the civil war the provision for education below the grade of college was sporadic and infrequent, nor, with the possible exception of the University of Virginia, was there a single college in the south to compare with those of the north. It is necessary to keep these things in mind—the habit of neglect, the established indifference, the educational poverty, both of thought and endowment—if we are to understand the conditions to-day. To those must be added that self-satisfied habit of mind which has always been one of the south 's heaviest handicaps. It was with such a history as this that the south had to meet the terrible conditions at the close of the civil war, and it is these traditions which are largely responsible for the tragic mistakes of these later years.

'Why should the children go to school?' asked a South Carolina mother. 'Every one in the county knows who we are.' So the children did not, and to-day are lounging through life in frayed and listless poverty. Even in towns where there was a less open avowal of the