For many years education of the Whites in the South has been aided from the North, first, through considerable gifts for the education of the Mountain Whites, and second through more sparing aid to colleges for Whites in the lowlands. Recently, however, the attention of wealthy Northern givers has been turned to the importance of uplifting the whole white Southern community, and after several annual visits to the South under the patronage of Mr. Robert C. Ogden, of New York, a Southern Education Board was formed, the purpose of which is to rouse people to the need of improving their education; following it is the General Education Board, which makes small gifts to educational institutions usually on the stipulation that they shall raise a conditional amount varying from an equal sum to a sum three times as great. This is the more necessary as there are only two or three institutions in the South that have anything like an adequate endowment. Tulane University in New Orleans has a property of several millions, and the University of Virginia has recently raised a new million outright, but the South has no large body of people with superfluous funds and its giving turns habitually rather in the direction of church construction and foreign mission work than to educational institutions. Of $1,400,000 given to the University of Virginia during thirty years, $900,000 came from Northerners and $270,000 more from foreigners living in the South. Of late, voices have been raised for some kind of Federal aid to Southern education on the plea that where there is the greatest intellectual destitution there is the most need for money. The appeal is contrary to the usual instincts of the South in matters of federal and state relations, and is strongly opposed by part of the Southern press, particularly the _Manufacturers' Record_, which has waged a campaign against even the private gifts made through the General Education Board. CHAPTER XXII NEGRO EDUCATION However cheering the interest in general public and higher education throughout the South, the Whites get most of the benefit; the lower third of the people, the most ignorant, the poorest, the least ambitious, those whose debasement is the greatest menace to the community, are less in the public eye; and the efforts to educate them arouse antagonism of various kinds. All calculations as to numbers of pupils, school expenditures, and public opinion as to education are subject to restatement when the Negroes are taken into account. Even in states like Maryland and Kentucky, where they are not a fourth of the population, they disturb the whole educational system, and in the Lower South, where they are in many places overwhelming in numbers, the problem of their education becomes alarming.