The six New England States, with a population of 2,705,000, had in 1850 but eight thousand unable to read and write, while Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama--five States, with a population of 2,670,000 whites--_had two hundred and sixty-two thousand, over twenty years of age, unable to read a word_! In the Northern States educational facilities are rapidly increasing, while in the South they are fast diminishing. In 1857 there were 96,000 school-children in Vermont, and all but six thousand attended school. South Carolina the same year had 114,000 school-children; of these _ninety-five thousand_ had no school privileges. Virginia had 414,000 school-children; _three hundred and seventy-two thousand_ of them had no means of learning the alphabet! In Missouri, in some of the counties, the school lands given by Congress have been sold, and the money distributed among the people, instead of being invested for the benefit of schools. With each generation ignorance has increased in the Southern States. It has been the design of the slaveholders to keep the poor white men in ignorance. There, neighbors are miles apart. There are vast tracts of land where the solitude is unbroken by the sounds of labor. Schools and newspapers cannot flourish. Information is given by word of mouth. Men are influenced to political action by the arguments and stories of stump-speakers, and not by reading newspapers. They vote as they are told, or as they are influenced by the stories they hear. So, when the leading conspirators were ready to bring about the rebellion, being in possession of the State governments, holding official positions, by misrepresentation, cunning, and wickedness, they were able to delude the ignorant poor men, and induce them to vote to secede from the Union. Two thousand years ago the natives of India manufactured cloth from the fibres of the cotton-plant, which grew wild in the woods. The old historian, Herodotus, says that the trees bore fleeces as white as snow. A planter of South Carolina obtained some of the seeds, and began to cultivate the plant. In 1748 ten bags of cotton were shipped to Liverpool, but cotton-spinning had not then begun in England. In 1784 the custom-house officers at Liverpool seized eight bags which a planter had sent over, on the ground that it was not possible to raise so much in America. The manufacture of cotton goods was just then commencing in England, and cotton was in demand. The plant grew luxuriantly in the sunny fields of the South, but it was a day's work for a negro to separate the seed from a pound, and the planters despaired of making it a profitable crop.