Page:The Atlantic Monthly vol. 69.djvu/744

734 are also allowed. This item amounted to $22,500 (scholarships and traveling expenses) in the year 1889-90. In the years from 1868 to 1886 a total of $1,576,649 was distributed from this fund for all purposes, making an average of upwards of $80,000 per annum. The funds are now managed so as to assist and encourage normal instruction chiefly.

Since 1883 this work of discriminating endowment has been reinforced by the Slater fund, which has aided the industrial phase of education. From 1883 to 1886 the trustees of this fund disbursed an average of $25,000 per annum. In the year 1888-89 the amount appropriated had increased to $44,310. This fund has recently been placed under the management of the agent of the Peabody fund.

During the twelve years 1877-89 the enrollment of both races in the schools of the fifteen former slave States and the District of Columbia increased more than twice as fast as the population. While the white population, as a whole, during that period gained over thirty-four per cent, the white enrollment in school gained seventy-five per cent, or double the ratio. While the colored population increased about twenty-five per cent, the colored increment in school was one hundred and thirteen per cent, or quadruple the rate.

It appears that in the last thirteen years the South has expended of public money the sum of $216,000,000 for education. Of this sum the colored schools have received about one fourth, say $50,000,000.' The colored school enrollment is about one fourth of the whole (twenty-seven and two thirds per cent in 1889). It is found that the white school population enrolls a larger proportion of children of school age than the colored; exceeding it, in fact, by about twenty per cent. This showing on the part of the South in the matter of school attendance stimulates and encourages the friends of the "new South." The friends of schools are at work in the legislatures of the Southern States to increase the length of the school term, which remains quite brief, being only ninety days, on an average, in the South Central States, and one hundred days in the South Atlantic States.

In the words of the former agent of the Slater fund, Rev. Dr. Haygood (recently appointed bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South), in his report for 1889: "There has never been at any time in the past so much thought concentrated upon the subject of education in the South by Southern people as now.… Notably the public schools have been championed by the church and press as never before. If any proof were lacking of an awakened interest in the subject, it is found in the attention now paid to the subject of the education of the masses by the county newspapers."