If there is no higher motive than self interest; that demands that the Southern people do everything in their power to make the negro an industrious, honest, self-supporting citizen. If the people of the North will help them do that in a fair sympathetic way their aid will always be welcomed. There are thoughtful men in the South who have lost faith in the power of the education which has heretofore been given to uplift the negro, and there is reason in their position, but public sentiment still clings to the school houses and to industrial education as the only hope of the future. Here is what Gov. Longino, in his inaugural address, says upon this subject: There is no danger so great to the affairs of any republic as an ignorant factious citizenship, whose tendencies have always been to overturn social order, political system, liberty, justice and right. Mississippi's greatest relief from this source of evil has been for many years found in the efficiency of her free schools and her colleges. The liberality, therefore, of the legislature in the past, in providing funds for their proper maintenance, has been both wise and patriotic, and I heartily commend the continuation of the same liberal spirit toward all the State's educational interests and institutions. The free school fund is now distributed among the counties per capita of the educable children in each. The relative attendance upon the free schools in the white is much greater than in the black counties, and hence, by reason of the fewer schools required for the accommodation of the attending pupils in the black counties affords those counties the use of the funds set apart to the non-attending children therein; hence, those counties are enabled from said fund to extend the term of their schools taught and to pay teachers better salaries than can the white counties where the larger proportion of the children attended the schools. Since the manifest purpose of the law is to favor equal educational facilities to all of the children of the State alike, I would commend to the legislature the submission of an amendment to section 206 of the constitution, so as to require the State free school fund to be distributed among the counties according to the actual attendance upon the schools, rather than per capita, as now.