Moreover, these poorly equipped states, indifferent to the education of the poor whites, and prejudiced against the education of the poor blacks, were awfully, bitterly poor. In 1870, after recovering from the worst shock of the war, there was nearly $1,500 in Massachusetts for every man, but there was in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina only a little over $200 for every man. Do you realize that $2,000,000,000 had been put into Confederate bonds to support that war, and that it was all gone? What would have been the state of the North if our public debt had been repudiated? And besides that, everything was in ruin, industries prostrated, society convulsed, and this poor stricken country had to lift up the debt of the Union as well as the North itself. We said bitterly, “They do not educate.” We said angrily, “They _won’t_ educate;” and, brethren, we ought to have said charitably, “Alas, O God, they _can’t_ educate!” Such, briefly, was the condition sixteen years ago. Now what has been done? Northern aid leaped to the rescue, as you well know. Millions have been given. That black form, lying blinded by ignorance at our feet, was bent over by patient, tender Christian sympathy, and the cataract lifted from his eyes with a golden, jeweled knife. Why, I look at the car of educational progress in the South, and under it I see 50,000 glittering wheels, on which it is rolling on, and those wheels are each one of them a ten dollar gold piece given last year by the North. There was, in the last report of the Commissioner of Education, 129 schools of higher education for colored youth and over 14,000 scholars in them; and almost without exception each of these schools has against it a name indicative that it sprung up out of Northern Christian benevolence. This is only a part of what the North has done. But, friends, we hear a great deal about this and we hear very little of what the South has done. Twenty years ago it was the law of the land that the negro should not be educated; and now in every state in the South it is the constitutional law that he shall be educated; and furthermore, the commissioners of these states say they will devote every energy within them to carry out this law. Kentucky (shame on her!) and Delaware (shame on her!) give to the negro what he pays in taxes, and they are pretty far North; all the rest of the South give of the school fund _per capita_ to the negro and to the white; and the constitutions of the states which enjoin this have been endorsed since the war by conventions in which the majority were white and originally secessionists. Oh yes! we Northerners gave, I know, $500,000 last year to educate the negro; Southern tax payers gave over $4,000,000 to educate him. I am comparing not the spirit in giving, but the amounts actually given. In our 129 schools we have 14,000 scholars. In the 14,000 colored public schools of the South there are nearly 700,000 scholars.