The Negro population of the Southern States is at present about nine million. In other words, the number of Negroes in the South is just about one fourth larger than the population of Greater London, which is something over seven million. Four fifths of this Southern Negro population still live on the plantations and in the small towns. From time to time thoughtful and interested persons--some of them, by the way, Englishmen--have visited the Southern States, talked with the white people and looked at the Negroes. Then they have gone back and written despondently, sometimes pessimistically, about the Negro problem. I wish some of these writers might study the situation of the races in the South long enough to determine what it would be possible to do there, not with seventy nor even fifty, but with one million dollars a year, provided that money were used, not for the purpose of feeding, sheltering, or protecting the Negro population, for which it is not needed, but in educating them; in building up the public schools in the country districts; in providing a system of high schools, industrial and agricultural schools, such as exists, for example, in Denmark; in extending the demonstration farming to all the people on the land, and in encouraging the small colleges to adapt their teaching to the actual needs of the people so that in the course of time Negro education in the South could be gradually organized and coördinated into a single coherent system. Perhaps I can illustrate in a broad way the difference in the situation of the poor man in the complex life of a great city like London and that of a similar class in the simpler conditions of a comparatively rural community, by a further comparison. The state of Alabama is nearly as large as England and Wales combined. It had, in 1900, a little more than one third the present population of what is known as "Administrative London," which means a city of 4,720,729. Of this population there were, on an average, 139,916 paupers. In Alabama, with a population in 1900 of 1,828,696, there were, in 1905, 771 paupers in almshouses, of whom 414 were white and 357 Negroes. In other words, while in London there were nearly three paupers for every one thousand of the population, in Alabama there were a little more than four paupers for every ten thousand of the population. This does not include the persons confined in asylums or those who are assisted in their homes. In Alabama the number of paupers cared for in this way is very small. As compared with the 2,000 charitable institutions in London, there were twenty such institutions in Alabama in 1904. Three of these, a hospital, an old folks' home and orphan asylum, and a school for the deaf and blind were for Negroes.