In at least two states this idea has been to some extent carried out. In Kentucky the state school fund is apportioned among the school children without regard to race, but for local purposes the Negroes appear to be thrown on their own payments. And in Maryland, under various statutes from 1865 to 1888, all the taxes collected from Negroes were devoted to negro schools, the state adding a lump sum per annum. This point of view involves a notion of the purpose of education and the reasons for public schools so different from that which animates the North that it is hard to deal with the question impartially. Massachusetts makes the largest expenditure per capita of its population in the whole Union, almost the largest expenditure per pupil, and certainly the largest aggregate expenditure, except the more populous states of New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio; Massachusetts spends on schools two fifths as much every year as all the fifteen former slaveholding states put together. In that state people think that school taxes are not money spent but money saved: that they get back every cent of their $17,000,000 a year, several times over, in the increased efficiency of the people, in the diminution of crime, in the addition to the happiness of life. Schooling is insurance, schooling is the savings bank that can't break, schooling is that sane kind of poor relief which prevents poverty. The last thing which any Massachusetts community thinks of reducing is school expenditure! Furthermore, no principle is so ingrained in the Northern mind as that since education is for the public benefit, every taxpayer must contribute in proportion to his property. The rich corporations in New York or Pittsburg, childless old couples, bachelor owners of great tracts of real estate, wealthy bondholders educating their children in private schools, never dream of disputing the school tax on the ground that they, as individuals, make no demands on the school fund.