The Southern people have shown their faith in the negro by spending one hundred million dollars for his education during the past thirty years. There are now 1,750,000 negro children enrolled in the public schools of the South. The nine cotton states, where the great mass of the negroes live, that is, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Arkansas, had in 1860 an assessed valuation of property for taxation of $3,244,231,406. In 1870, the valuation had decreased to $1,830,863,180 or 43 per cent. The ability to raise money by taxation had decreased one-half. The burden of negro education had been placed upon the people of the South in their poverty. There has been murmuring at the burden in Mississippi, and efforts have been made to confine appropriations of money for negro education to the amount of money raised from negro taxation for the benefit of schools, that plan, however, has never met with popular approval. There are a few men in the South who contend that the negro should be kept in an eternal state of ignorance, but their following is small. The most convincing argument of the fairness of the South to the negro is the industrial opportunity which is afforded him. All professions and callings and all industries are open to the negro. There is absolutely no discrimination in industrial lines on account of color. The negro is at liberty to sell his power to work everywhere. The negro is not confined to menial employment. There are negroes in Mississippi who are lawyers, doctors, teachers, and a few of them are preachers. They are engaged in the various branches of the mercantile business and in all of the trades. They are blacksmiths, carpenters and shoemakers. When they can do their work as skilfully as the white man they are employed. In the professions, of course, their duties are confined to their own race. It is a well known fact that the negro is eliminated as an industrial factor in the North by trades unionism. It may be right and this statement is not made in a spirit of criticism, but for the purpose of showing the advantages which the South offers the negro. There is a determined purpose in the South to curtail the power of the negro to vote, but he has the same chance as the white man to earn his bread. The common every day relations between the white man and the negro are sincere and kindly. There is no persecution of the negro in Mississippi. Rev. Edgar Garner Murphy beautifully and truthfully describes the relations between the whites and the blacks in his very able paper on "The White Man and the Negro at the South." Mr. Murphy says: