1.  The United States government is directly responsible for the illiteracy and the widespread poverty which obtain in the South.  Under its sanction and by its connivance the institution of slavery flourished and prospered, until it had taken such deep root as to be almost impossible of extirpation.  It was the Union, and not the States, severally, which made slavery part and parcel of the fundamental law of the land.  If this be a correct statement of the case, and I assume that it is, the Union (and not the States, severally) is responsible for the ignorance of the black people of the South.  Slavery could not have existed and grown in the Union save by permission of all the States of the Union.  It is therefore obvious that the agency which created and fostered a great crime is obligated, not only by the laws of God but of man as well, to assume the responsibility of its creation and to remedy, as far as possible, the evil results of that crime.  The issue cannot be evaded.  The obligation rests upon the Union, not upon the several States, to assume the direction of methods by which the appalling illiteracy of the South is to be diminished.

2.  There have not been wanting men and newspapers to urge that the United States should reimburse the slave-holders of the South for the wholesale confiscation, so to speak, of their property.  True, these men and newspapers belong to that class of unrepentants who believed that slavery was a Divine institution and that the slave-holder was a sort of vicegerent of heaven, a holy Moses, as it were.  But when we leave the absurdity of this claim, which lies upon the surface, there is much apparent reason in their representations.  It was the Union which legalized the sale and purchase of slave property, thereby inviting capitalists to invest in it; and it was the Union which declared such contracts null and void by the abolition of slavery, or confiscation of slave property.  As I said before, I have no sympathy with those who invested their money in slave property.  They not only received their just deserts in having their property confiscated, but they should have been compelled to make restitution to the last penny to the poor slaves whom they had systematically robbed.  But perhaps this would have been carrying justice too near the ideal.  For the great debt to the slave, who was robbed of his honest wage, we go behind the slave-holder, who had been invited by the government to invest his money in blood; we go to the head of the firm for the payment of debts contracted by the firm, for each member of the government is, measurably, an agent of the government, contracting and paying debts by its delegated authority.  Thus the law holds him guilty who willfully breaks a contract entered into in good faith by all the parties to it.  Instead of holding the slave-holder responsible for the robbery of the black man through a period of a hundred years, we hold the government responsible.