In Cordova, S. C., in 1907, a business man who had visited a colored school and spoken encouragingly to the pupils, felt compelled by public sentiment to print an apology and a promise never to do anything so dreadful again. This criticism comes not simply from demagogues like Vardaman or weaklings like the Cordovan; intelligent planters will tell you that they are opposed to negro education because it makes criminals; and think their accusation proven by instances of forgeries by Negroes, which of course they could not have committed had they been unable to write. A superintendent of schools in a Southern city holds that even grammar school education unsteadies the boys so that they leave home and drift away; though he candidly acknowledges that it keeps the girls out of trouble and provides a respectable calling as teachers to many negro women. Side by side with this feeling of disappointment or hostility, as the case may be, is the conviction of most Southern people that enormous sacrifices have been made for the negro schools. Thomas Dixon, Jr., with his accustomed exactness and candor, wrote a few years ago: "We have spent about $800,000,000 on Negro education since the War." These figures show a poverty of imagination: it would be just as easy to write "eight thousand millions" as "eight hundred." The estimate of the Bureau of Education is that in the thirty-five years since 1870 about $155,000,000 has been spent to support common schools for the negro race, which is about a fifth of the amount spent on the white common schools in the same period, and not a hundredth of the supposed present wealth of the South; in addition, heavy expenditures are made out of the public treasury for secondary and higher education in which the Negro has a slender share. Another more specious complaint with regard to Negro education is that it is an unreasonable burden on the Whites to make them pay for negro education, and repeated attempts have been made to lay it down as a principle that the Negroes shall have for their schools only what they pay in taxes. Thus Governor Hoke Smith, of Georgia, says: "Is it not folly to tax the people of Georgia for the purpose of conducting a plan of education for the Negro which fails to recognize the difference between the Negro and the white man? Negro education should have reference to the Negro's future work, and especially in the rural districts it is practicable to make that education really the training for farm labor. If it is given this direction it will not be necessary to tax the white man's property for the purpose. A distribution of the school fund according to the taxes paid by each race would meet the requirements."