“An educated community will demand suitable educational facilities for the education of all classes of children. So that we may reasonably hope that the appropriation from the national treasury need not extend beyond a period of ten or fifteen years.” * * * * * ADDRESS OF MR. BUTLER R. WILSON AT THE BOSTON ANNIVERSARY, MAY 31, 1882. If I fail to be a good specimen, do not attribute it to my race; for my people were converted from a condition of chattel slavery into that of American citizenship, depending almost entirely upon themselves. What has been the result? In spite of nearly 20,000 political murders since the war, they have not all been killed; nor, at the present rate of increase, is it reasonable to suppose that they all will be. The prophecy of many good people, many worthy people, many earnest people, that the ballot in the hand of the negro was a stick with which to break the government’s head, finds its answer in the fact that the most loyal and law-abiding citizens south of Mason and Dixon’s line, to-day, are the ex-slaves. With not enough land for a burial ground, had they all died immediately after the war, they now pay taxes on millions of dollars worth of real estate and personal property, being assessed for nearly $10,000,000 in the State of Georgia alone. Prior to the war there was a law throughout the South prohibiting a colored person from learning to read and write on penalty of losing the thumb or index finger, so that what they now know in that direction they have acquired since the war; and to-day ten per cent. of the entire colored race in the South can read and write. This ability, on the part of the colored man, is a great step in his progress, for it introduces a new rule of computation in the Southern arithmetic—the old rule being, as you probably know, in Southern vernacular: “A naught is a naught and a figger is a figger; Put down the naught and carry the figger. A naught is a naught and a figger is a figger. All the cotton for the white man and none for the nigger.”