A rough measure of the need of education is the statistics of illiteracy, which in the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education is defined as the status of a person over ten years of age who is able neither to read nor to write. Such illiterates in Germany are about one per cent of the population; in England about six per cent; in the whole of the United States about ten per cent. The various states of the Union show great variations: in Nebraska in 1900 it was two per cent; and the lowest Southern state, Missouri, with six per cent, showed a greater proportion of illiterates than any of 27 Northern states; while the 12 highest communities on the list, from Arkansas with twenty per cent to Louisiana with thirty-eight per cent, are all Southern but two. Of 58,000,000 persons sufficiently old to be capable of both reading and writing in some language in the United States in 1900, 6,000,000 were illiterate, of whom about 4,000,000 lived in the South; of the 21 most illiterate states and territories, 15 are Southern, the worst being Alabama, South Carolina, and Louisiana, in all of which more than a third of the population was illiterate. This alarming state of things is not due wholly to the negro race; out of 5,700,000 blacks at least ten years of age, 2,700,000, or forty-eight per cent, were illiterate; out of 13,000,000 Whites, 1,400,000, or eleven per cent, were illiterates. The white illiterates, with all the advantages of their superior race, were half as numerous as the Negroes! Out of 1,900,000 white children of school age, 200,000, or ten and a half per cent, could not read or write; out of 1,000,000 colored children of the same age, 300,000 were illiterate, which is twenty-five per cent. For both races this proportion of illiterates is steadily diminishing; and that is the effect of the schools and of nothing else. Never again will the South see a generation like the present, in which many adults have had no opportunity, or have neglected the opportunity of going to school when children. These figures accord with the experience of other states; for instance, New Hampshire in 1890 was as illiterate as Missouri was in 1900; and in both states illiteracy is steadily decreasing. As for the Southern Poor Whites, it is true, as Murphy says, that they have a potentiality of education. "I find no hopelessness in it, because it is the illiteracy, not of the degenerate, but simply of the unstarted. Our unlettered white people are native American in stock, virile in faculty and capacity, free in spirit, unbroken, uncorrupted, fitted to learn."