Now as far as figures can give one anything like an adequate conception, the situation is about this: In 1900 there were 8,683,762 persons of school age in what we are used to call the Southern states,—5,594,284 white persons and 3,089,478 black. It should be said in passing, yet with all emphasis, that the South may as well get used to reckoning the children of its former slaves in both its educational assets and educational liabilities. Justice and expediency are both vitally involved in this view of the situation. Now, of this future citizenship only sixty out of every hundred were actually in process of school training, and of this enrollment only forty-two were, on the average, in daily attendance. The only comfort that one can get in this situation is by looking back and seeing that conditions have been worse and forward to see that they are bound to be better. These figures, then, represent the mass of material that popular education has to deal with and the actual portion upon which it is really working. Now when one considers the machinery of instruction, the teachers, the school-property, the length of terms, and the capital invested, one sees even more vividly that the democracy of the immediate future must be limited in its development, not alone because its children are not in process of training but because the means themselves are inadequate and inefficient. The entire country pays, on the average, for its men teachers a salary of $49.00 per month, for its women $40.00. The South gets its men for $35.63 and its women for $30.47. Leaving out of consideration the quality of service to be had at such a pitifully low price, one can be perfectly sure that no high professional ideals and standards can be maintained at such rates. But let us look at the matter from another standpoint; upon every child in its schools the South spends $6.95 as against $10.57 for the entire country; while some states of the West spend $31.49, some Southern states are spending only $4.50. It is not surprising therefore to see what this means as to the average length of school term among us: in the entire country every child has a chance to be in school at least 145 days, while the child of the South has open to him only 99 days. Clear enough is it, then, that democracy in this section is, in comparison with the rest of the Union, handicapped in the very beginning of its race. Moreover, the relation of popular education to its best life, in the light of the situation revealed by these figures, is a deep and fundamental one.