If the government should enable North Carolina to keep up her schools for four months at fair wages, instead of one month, as at present, at such a salary as can secure only an inferior teacher, it would be something, but not all that is needed. If such a sum should be given, Mississippi would receive as her share of it $1,119,603; New Jersey, with nearly exactly the same population, would receive $159,747. But $959,529 of Mississippi’s share would be because of colored illiteracy, leaving nearly exactly the same amount for white illiterates which New Jersey would receive, which shows conclusively that it is because of the negro chiefly this help is needed, and for him, as a voter, the nation at large is responsible. In considering the disparity between the sum that would go to the South and the new States of the Northwest respectively, not only must we remember the negro as a factor in the problem, but also these facts: By the ordinance of 1787, by which Virginia ceded the great northwest territory to the general government on such terms‒Mr. Webster said, in his great speech on the Foote resolution‒as “fixed forever the character of the population of the vast regions northwest of the Ohio by excluding from them involuntary servitude, and impressed on the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than freemen.” And six days after, in his reply to Hayne, he said, also, that “it set forth and declared it to be a high and binding duty of the government itself to support schools and advance the means of education on the plain reason that religion, morality and knowledge are necessary to good government.” By this ordinance of cession, Virginia stipulated that the proceeds from this vast territory should be considered as a common fund for the use and benefit of such as have become or may become members of the confederation or federal alliance of States. The other States claiming unsettled lands within their territory also ceded their titles to the general government, which became possessed of the whole. From time to time Congress has made most liberal grants of this land to the new States for school purposes, so that Minnesota, for example, has realized from her share, or has the land from which, at the same rate of sale, she can realize a fund of $20,000,000 for educational purposes, while the old States have not had a dollar, excepting their share in the grant for the endowment of agricultural colleges by Act of 1862, in which the new States as well as the old shared ratably. It may be truly said, then, that every instinct of self-preservation demands that the unquestionable right of the general government shall be exercised in using the means at its disposal to meet the great danger which threatens us from the presence and power of ignorant voters; and that every sentiment of justice to the negro himself as the subject of many wrongs and the possible avenger of them, and to the States