permit one-third, and that the fairest portion of its
domain, to become the spawning ground of ignorance, vice,
anarchy, and of every crime. The nation as such abolished
slavery as a legal institution; but ignorance is slavery,
and no matter what is written in your constitutions and your
laws, slavery will continue until intelligence, handmaid of
liberty, shall have illuminated the whole land with the
light of her smile.

Before the war the Southern States were aristocracies,
highly educated, and disciplined in the science of polities.
Hence they preserved order and flourished at home, while
they imposed their will upon the nation at large. Now all is
changed. The suffrage is universal, and that means universal
ruin unless the capacity to use it intelligently is created
by universal education. Until the republican constitutions,
framed in accordance with the Congressional reconstruction
which supplanted the governments initiated by President
Johnson, common-school systems, like universal suffrage,
were unknown. Hence in a special manner the nation is
responsible for the existence and support of those systems
as well as for the order of things which made them
necessary. That remarkable progress has been made under
their influence is true, and that the common school is fast
becoming as dear to the masses of the people at the South as
elsewhere is also evident.

The Nation, through the Freedmen's Bureau, and perhaps to a
limited extent in other ways, has expended five millions of
dollars for the education of negroes and refugees in the