The idea of giving to the newly enfranchised a sound, practical
education was considered at the dawn of freedom, an easy solution of
what as an unsolved problem threatened the perpetuity of republican
institutions. Within a year from the firing on Sumter, benevolent and
farsighted Northern friends had established schools from Washington to
the Gulf of Mexico, which became centers of light penetrating the
darkness and scattering the blessings of an enlightened manhood far
and wide.

The history of the world cannot produce a more affecting spectacle
than the growth of this mighty Christian philanthropy which, in
beginning amid the din of battle, has steadily marched on through
every opposing influence, and lifted a race from weakness to strength,
from poverty to wealth, from moral and intellectual nonentity to place
and power among the nations of the earth.

We have ten millions of colored people in the United States whose
condition is much better to-day than it was fifty years ago. Then he
had nothing, not even a name. To-day he has 160,000 farms under good
cultivation and valued at $4,000,000 and has personal property valued
at $200,000,000. In the Southland the negroes own 160 first-class drug
stores, nine banks, 13 building associations, and 100 insurance and
benefit companies, two street railways and an electric at
Jacksonville, Fla., which they started some few years ago when the
white people passed the Jim Crow law for that state.

Now it is reckoned that the negroes in the United States are paying
about $700,000,000 property taxes and this is only one-fifth of all
they have accumulated, for the negro is getting more like the white
people every day and has learned from him that it is not a sign of