A defense of the civil rights of the Negro was brought prominently to the fore in the Fifty-first Congress. In his remarks on the affairs of South Carolina,[62] Thomas E. Miller, a representative from that State, declared that the Negroes of South Carolina were suffering from several distinct causes. Among these causes he named lynch law, the petty system of theft which deprived them of the fruits of their daily toil, and injustice in the courts in which they had no rights where their interests and those of the whites conflicted. He demanded for them trial by jury, pay for their work, and the assurance that their lynchers would not become also their legislators. These considerations, he maintained, were of invaluable importance to the country. Miller, furthermore, deplored the action of the Governor of his State, which refused State aid to Negro schools and caused to be closed certain white colleges which had the courage to consider, in a sane way, the so-called Negro problem. In the Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Congresses, the questions of the protection of the Negroes in the exercise of their civil rights demanded virtually the entire attention of George H. White, who was at that time the sole Negro member of Congress. Among his many protests of discrimination, appeals for just treatment, and discourses on the upright character of his race, there were no speeches more significant nor more prophetic than his arraignment of the apathetic manner with which Congress had greeted his bill, designed "to give to the federal government entire jurisdiction over all cases of lynching and death by mob violence." If, he declared, the nation is to avoid the state of anarchy and moral decay to which conditions were then rapidly leading, there remained no alternative, save the enactment, by some future Congress, of a law to constitute lynching a federal offense.[63] EDUCATION Despite the great significance attached by many of the Congressmen to the civil rights of the Negroes, that of the education of the freedman was considered hardly less important. One of the first Negro Congressmen to commit himself on this problem was Rainey of South Carolina. That he had the proper grasp of the educational needs of his country is shown by his forceful speech made for national aid to education. He contended that the natural result of this mental improvement will be to impart a better understanding of our institutions, and thus cultivate a loyal disposition and lofty appreciation for them. "The military prowess and demonstrated superiority of the Prussians, when compared to the French, especially in the late war [The Franco-Prussian War]," said he, "is attributable to the fact that the masses of the former were better educated and trained than those of the latter. The leavening spirit of the German philosophers has apparently pervaded all classes of the population of that empire."[64]