It should be remembered, too, that in spite of its poverty, in spite of the fact that its energies have been given to a pressing struggle for its very existence, the South has had to maintain a two-fold system of popular education. It has had to care for the children of its former slaves in separate schools, and bear virtually all the expense. This has both complicated its problem and necessarily limited its educational advancement. But at this time it can be asserted with emphasis, that the South, in spite of certain reactionary eddies in the current of its thinking, will still continue to support Negro schools. Our best thought is fast fixing itself in the unalterable conviction that to keep the black man in ignorance is an injustice to ourselves as well as to him; and, moreover, that expediency itself dictates that he shall neither remain sunken in the night of illiteracy nor mistrained for the sphere of life for which he is, in his present stage of advancement, fitted. Therefore popular education has meant, will continue to mean, with the South a two-fold system of education. And the Southern white man, with his own taxes, is largely to maintain it,—at least for many years to come. But above everything else, the chief consideration with reference to the whole question of popular education in the South, both as to its needs and difficulties, is that we are dealing with a rural folk and rural conditions. More than eighty-three per cent of the Southern people live in the country,—a pure, wholesome Anglo-Saxon stock of unwasted, if untrained, physical, intellectual and moral qualities. The problem of popular education in villages, towns, and cities is virtually solved. The task therefore is concerned wholly with what we shall do for and with the saving, and in this case, the larger remnant which draws its support from the fields. No democracy ever had better or richer assets from which to recuperate itself, or a more inspiring duty to perform in giving this class opportunity for training and development. But from the very nature of the case the proper performance of this duty is a task of stupendous magnitude, and even an approximate accomplishment of it must wait upon necessarily slow processes. The deep-seated conservatism of the people, the extent to which illiteracy prevails and the narrow poverty in many sections, remote and widely-sundered homes, roads almost impassable at certain seasons of the year, the immediate need of the children in the fields, even if the best of schools were at their doors,—here are conditions which would discourage any but a brave and patient people who believe in the divine right of all to whatever power there is in knowledge and the bounden duty of the state to offer to all its opportunities.