Education is now the talisman—the desire and aim of all the vast influx of immigrants who come within our gates. The children of the foreign-born population of the country are, by the last census, less illiterate, even in the North, than those of the native-born. Unless we furnish these people good schools, we can never hope to get a good class of immigrants to come to us. Without good schools, if we get any, it will be only the poorest class. And nothing would help us more in the South than to get in the best class. * * * * * Now, as to the form of education which will be of most value to the Negroes and of most value to the South—for the two, instead of being opposed to each other, as, according to our self-righteous critics, we appear to believe, are bound up in one. Unhappily, the system of education heretofore pursued with the Negroes has been so futile in its results that a considerable proportion of Southerners, knowing the facts against all the assertion of Negro leaders, and all the clamor of those outside the South who are ignorant of the facts, believe sincerely that the educated are more worthless and more dangerous to the welfare and peace of the community in which they live than the uneducated. That is, it is the sincere belief of a considerable number of enlightened and thoughtful whites, perfectly conversant with the situation, that the earnest effort of the South to educate the Negroes, extending through a generation, at an expense of over $110,000,000, contributed out of the property of the Southern whites, has been a complete failure in that the beneficiaries of this effort are not as good workers, or as good citizens, as the generation which preceded them, and use the education so given them, where they use it at all, in ways which are not beneficial to themselves and are injurious to the whites. This is a condition sufficiently grave to require thoughtful consideration, and it must be met by argument rather than by vilification, or even by mere dogmatism.