The South and the National Government | Page 6

a spirit of emulation or competition, so that to-day the tropical Negroes of the West Indies do much better work for us in the canal construction since we brought over Spanish, Italian, and Greek laborers.
Ultimately, of course, the burden of Negro education must fall on the Southern people and on Southern property owners. Private charity and munificence, except by way of furnishing an example and a model, can do comparatively little in this direction. It may take some time to hasten the movement for the most generous public appropriations for the education of the Negro, but the truth that in the uplifting of the Negro lies the welfare of the South is forcing itself on the far-sighted of the Southern leaders. Primary and industrial education for the masses, higher education for the leaders of the Negro race, for their professional men, their clergymen, their physicians, their lawyers, and their teachers, will make up a system under which their improvement, which statistics show to have been most noteworthy in the last forty years, will continue at the same rate.
On the whole, then, the best public opinion of the North and the best public opinion of the South seem to be coming together in respect to all the economic and political questions growing out of present race conditions.
The attitude of the candidate and the platform of the Democratic Party in the last election made this campaign a most favorable one to bring home to the Southern people for serious consideration the query why they should still adhere to political solidity in the South. It may be that four years hence the candidate and platform of the Democratic Party will more approve themselves to the South and to the intelligent men of the South. Under these conditions there may seem to be a retrograde step, and the South continue solid, but I venture to think that the movement now begun will grow, slowly at first, but ultimately so as to extend the practical political arena for the discussion of party issues into all the Southern States.
The recent election has made it probable that I shall become more or less responsible for the policy of the next Presidential Administration, and I improve this opportunity to say that nothing would give me greater pride, because nothing would give me more claim to the gratitude of my fellow-citizens, than if I could so direct that policy in respect to the Southern States as to convince its intelligent citizens of the desire of the Administration to aid them in working out satisfactorily the serious problems before them and of bringing them and their Northern fellow-citizens closer and closer in sympathy and point of view. During the last decade, in common with all lovers of our country, I have watched with delight and thanksgiving the bond of union between the two sections grow firmer. I pray that it may be given to me to strengthen this movement, to obliterate all sectional lines, and leave nothing of difference between the North and the South, save a friendly emulation for the benefit of our common country.

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