The _fact_ that the negro is a negro, carries with it the inference or the necessity that his education—the cultivation of his faculties, or the development of his intelligence—must be in harmony with itself, and therefore must be an entirely different thing from the education of the Caucasian. The term education, in regard to our own race, has widely different significations. It may be the mere development of the mind, or it may mean, with the cultivation of the intellect, the formation of the character, as Pope says: “’Tis education forms the common mind; Just as the twig is bent, the tree’s inclined.” But without restricting the term to the former limit—the development of the intelligence—it will be found that the education of the negro at the South is in entire harmony with his wants, the character of his mind, the necessities of his mental organism; and that they are the best educated negro population ever known in human experience. Common sense and experience teach us to educate all creatures committed to our charge in accordance with their wants. No one would presume to teach a horse as he would a dog, or any other animal. We have our schools for girls as well as for boys, and the education varies continually as the child changes into youth, adolescence, and finally into manhood. The nature and condition of the pupil are the great central facts—whether a horse or a dog, a boy or a girl, a youth or a man, a negro or a Caucasian; the education must, if natural and proper, always hinge on this central fact. The negro brain and mental character, as has been shown, differs from our own both in degree and in quality, in the extent of its powers, and the form or modes of mental action. As still more strikingly manifest among animals, the negro child has more intelligence than the white of the same age. This is in harmony with the great fundamental law which renders the most perfectly organized beings most dependent on reason—in the parents, if not that of the offspring. The calf or pig of a month has more intelligence than the child of that age; the negro child has more than that of the Caucasian, but the character of this intelligence, of course, varies in each and every case. In the lower animals it is instinct; in the case of the negro child it is more than instinct, but it is also radically different from that nascent rationality peculiar to the white child. Nevertheless, it is intelligence, and, as observed, more active in the negro child than in that of the white of the same age—an intelligence which enables it to preserve life where the former would, perhaps, perish, and thus to preserve the race amid the exigencies of savagism and the absence of care and forethought in the parents. It is this smartness of the negro child that has often deceived and deluded those perverse and deluded people of our own race, who get up negro schools. They see, or rather