As small as may appear to be the amount expended by the South on public education, those who have not known conditions there can have little idea as to the strain upon her resources which this amount has caused. In “The Present South,” pp. 42, 43 _et seq._, Edgar Gardner Murphy says: “The figures of our national census show that from 1860 to 1870 there was a fall of $2,100,000,000 in the assessed value of Southern property and that the period of Reconstruction added, in the years from 1870 to 1880, another $67,000,000 to the loss. “In 1860 the assessed value of property in Massachusetts was $777,000,000, as contrasted with $5,200,000,000 for the whole South. “But at the close of the war period Massachusetts had, in 1870, $1,590,000,000 in taxable property, as contrasted with but $3,000,000,000 for the whole South. “It is interesting to note that in 1890 there was ‘expended for public schools on each $100 of true valuation of all real and personal property’ 22.3 cents in Arkansas and 24.4 cents in Mississippi, as compared with 20.5 cents in New York and 20.9 in Pennsylvania. See Report of the U. S. Commissioner of Education, 1902, Vol. I. p. xci.” ILLITERACY IN THE SOUTH. The following is taken from Publication 8, Twelfth United States Census: “The illiteracy of the native white population of the Southern States ranges from 8.6 per cent. in Florida, 8 per cent. in Mississippi, and 6.1 per cent. in Texas, to 17.3 per cent. in Louisiana, and 19.5 per cent. in North Carolina, as contrasted with 0.8 per cent. in Nebraska, 1.3 per cent. in Kansas, 2.1 per cent. in Illinois, 1.2 per cent. in New York, and 0.8 per cent. in Massachusetts. A far juster comparison, however, is that which indicates the contrast, not between the South and the rest of the country in 1900, but between the South of 1880 and the South of to-day.’ TABLE SHOWING THE RANK OF EACH STATE IN PERCENTAGE OF ILLITERACY OF THE NATIVE WHITE POPULATION TEN YEARS OF AGE AND OVER: 1900.