In the matter of education, to recur again to the South in particular, the blacks are most outrageously discriminated against in favor of the whites, who have more and better school buildings, more and better paid teachers even where the blacks out-number them, longer school terms and a much higher per capita rate of the public school funds than have the children of the blacks. The problem of the South appears to be not how much education but how little it can possibly give the blacks in comparison with what it gives the whites. In all this educational business the South reasons that the blacks must be kept well in the rear of the whites, because they are to remain a permanently inferior class. That section is not anxious to reduce the illiteracy of its colored population and to raise the standard of their intelligence, for it thinks that an ignorant labor class is less difficult to manage than an intelligent one. Ignorance is indeed apt to be stolid and submissive under circumstances in which intelligence becomes restless and discontented. Therefore the South has little love or use for an intelligent labor class, but desires above all things an ignorant one, and does what in it lies to hinder educational progress among its colored population. But ignorance is a breeder of crime just as poverty is. They are the parents of much of the crime committed by the Negroes just as they are the parents of much of the crime committed by the whites. Our criminal classes do many things which the law forbids to be done not because they are of one race or color or of another race or color, but mainly because they are poor and ignorant. Who then in these circumstances are the ultimate criminal, those who are unwillingly poor and ignorant, or those who make and keep them so by bad and unequal laws, by bad and unequal treatment? Such is the story of what the whites did to educate the blacks at the most impressionable period of their freedom in democracy, in orderly government and Christian civilization. And it is the story of that education during the last fifty years. There was never kindness to the blacks and sympathy from the Southern whites as of men to men. The human touch which makes, or which ought to make, all men brothers has been woefully wanting in the whites as a race towards the blacks as a race. There has been kindness and perhaps much kindness from individual white people to individual Colored people, but never from the mass of the whites to the mass of the blacks, but just the contrary. Instead of kindness of the one race to the other there has been increasing ill-will and active injustice as of one enemy to another. If crime there has been in consequence of this deplorable, this terrible fact who is the ultimate criminal? At the bar of history and at the bar of God, I ask, Who is the ultimate criminal? Transcriber's Notes: Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.