However, neither the pressure of poverty, nor the double burden of caring for two races in separate schools, nor the special difficulty growing out of the peculiar nature of conditions, nor the huge magnitude of the task, has daunted courage or enfeebled effort. On every hand there are inspiring marks of progress, and results prophetic of greater advances yet to follow. In the first place, the last six or eight years have been a period of quite remarkable educational agitation throughout the entire South. Every kind of leadership has been systematically at work to quicken the conscience and stir the sentiment of the people on this subject. Pulpit, press, organized philanthropy, and civil authority have combined with professional educators in a campaign whose rallying-cry has been the uplifting of democracy through the power of the schoolhouse. The general result is an interest both wide and intelligent, an awakened conscience, and an aroused sentiment throughout all this Southern land, all of which tends to put behind special and definite efforts of improvement an irresistible public opinion. The South is therefore keenly realizing its sense of civic obligation and its duty to its own future, and when the South once sees its duty and that rich vein of sentimentality, which lies at the basis of its temperament, is once touched, there will be no turning back. And surely it has now seen its duty and its sentimentality is thoroughly alive to all that popular education means to the child of to-day and the state of to-morrow. For this condition we have to thank, not only the church, the press, and organized philanthropy, but a strikingly courageous and far-sighted political leadership, which the situation has called forth,—men, for example, like Governor Frazier of Tennessee, Governor Aycock of North Carolina, Governor Heyward of South Carolina, and Governor Montague of Virginia, men who have convincingly fought for the inalienable right of every child to be trained by the state at public expense. To their influence must also be added the skilled patriotic service of such State Superintendents of Public Instruction as Mynders, Martin, MacMahan, Merritt, Whitefield and Joyner,—men who seemed to regard their office as peculiarly the most sacred of all trusts committed by a people to public servants. The people have listened to such as these when they might have turned deaf ears to voices from any other source.