and innate improvidence of this people; and they do this for various reasons, none of them honorable, many of them really disreputable.  In dealing with this negro problem they always start off upon a false premise; their conclusions must, necessarily, be false.  In the first place, disregarding the fact that the negroes of the South are nothing more nor less than the laboring class of the people, the same in many particulars as the English and Irish peasantry, they proceed to regard them as intruders in the community—­as a people who continually take from but add nothing to the wealth of the community.

It is nothing unusual to see newspaper articles stating in the most positive terms that the schools maintained by the State for the education of the blacks are supported out of the taxes paid by white men; and, very recently, it was spoken of as a most laudable act of justice and generosity that the State of Georgia paid out annually for the maintenance of colored schools more money than the aggregate taxes paid into the treasury of the State by the Negro property owners of the State; while the grand commonwealth of Kentucky only appropriates for the maintenance of colored schools such moneys as are paid into the State treasury by the colored people.  Can the philosophy of taxation be reduced to a more hurtful, a more demoralizing absurdity!

Suppose the same standard of distribution of school funds should be applied to the city or the State of New York; what would be the logical result?  Should we appropriate annually from nine to twelve millions of dollars to improve the morals of the people by informing their intelligence?  Would the State be able, after ten years of such an experiment, to pay the myriads of officials which would be required to preserve the public peace, to protect life and insure proper respect for the so-called rights of property?  Such an experiment would in time require the deportation to New York of the entire male adult population of Ireland, to be turned into the “finest police in the world,” to stem the tide of crime and immorality which such premium upon ignorance would entail.  Since even under the present munificent and well ordered school system, it is almost impossible to elect a Board of Aldermen from any other than the slum elements of the population—­the liquor dealers, the gamblers, and men of their kind, the President of the New York Board of Aldermen at this very writing being a liquor-dealer, who can estimate the calamity which the inauguration of the Kentucky system would bring upon the people of New York—­appropriating to the support of the public schools only such taxes as were paid by the parents of the children who attend them!

And, yet, there is hardly an editor in the South who does not regard it as so much robbery of the tax-payers to support schools for the colored people—­for the proletarian classes generally, white and colored.  They stoutly maintain that these people really add nothing to the stock of wealth, really produce nothing, and that, therefore charity can become no more magnanimous than when it gives, places in reach of, the poor man the opportunity to educate his child, the embryo man, the future citizen.