"For several years since the nineties it has been my privilege to serve a large charitable institution here," a Southern friend writes me from a Northern city. "On the Fourth of July I join with as much fervor as anybody in the flag salute, in singing 'America' and all the other patriotic songs, until they come to 'Marching Through Georgia.' That takes the very heart out of me! Sometimes it is all I can do to keep from bursting into tears! Then again I feel as if I must stand up and shout: 'We should not teach any American child to sing that song!' You know the home of one of my dearest friends was in the way of that march; it was burned to the ground and she, a little girl, and her aged grandfather wandered homeless in the night. I wonder, O, I wonder, if our soldiers in the Philippines, Northern and Southern boys, are giving grounds for any such songs as that! I'd rather we'd lose the fight!" A cause operating against education of both races remains to be cited. The carpet-bag, scalawag and negroid State Governments made raids on educational funds. In North Carolina, $420,000 in railroad stock belonging to the Educational Fund for the Benefit of Poor Children were sold for $158,000, to be applied in part payment of extended per diems of legislators. These legislators gave at State expense lavish entertainments, and kept a bar and house of prostitution in the Capitol; took trips to New York and gambled away State funds by thousands; war had left a school fund, taxation increased it; but for two years no child, white or black, received benefits. There was money enough for the Governor to raise and equip two regiments, one of negroes, for intimidation of whites, but none for education. Of Georgia's public school fund of $327,000, there seems not to have been a penny left to the State when her million-dollar legislature adjourned in 1870.