Speaking in the Senate of the United States June 13, 1882, the bill
for National "Aid to Common Schools" being under consideration,
Senator Henry W. Blair, of New Hampshire, said:

Excluding the states of Maryland and Missouri and the
District of Columbia, and the total yearly expenditure for
both races is only $7,339,932, while in the whole country
the annual expenditure is, from taxation, $70,341,435, and
from school funds $6,580,632, or a total of $76,922,067,
(see tables 2 and 7,) or one-tenth of the whole, while they
contain one-fifth of the school-population. The causes which
have produced this state of things in the Southern States
are far less important than the facts themselves as they now
exist. To find a remedy and apply it is the only duty which
devolves upon us. Without universal education, not only will
the late war prove to be a failure, but the abolition of
slavery be proved to be a tremendous disaster, if not a
crime.

The country was held together by the strong and bloody
embrace of war, but that which the nation might and did do
to retain the integrity of its territory and of its laws by
the expenditure of brute force will all be lost if, for the
subjection of seven millions of men, by the statutes of the
States is to be substituted the thraldom of ignorance and
the tyranny of an irresponsible suffrage. Secession, and a
confederacy founded upon slavery as its chief cornerstone,
would be better than the future of the Southern
States--better for both races, too--if the nation is to