No more significant testimony could be given to this change than a sort of wail in the Atlantic Monthly over the “New Departure in Negro Life,” a lament over the decadence of “the jocund customs of the past,” with its thoughtless levity and hilarity, and over the “half-hearted manner in which the characteristic festivities that remain are gone through with.” What does it mean? It means, says the writer, that “an unmistakable change in the negro character is at hand, and in an advanced state of progress. He is putting away childish things and striving in his own crude way to grasp matters of higher import. The bulk of the race have learned to read after a fashion. His primer, his vade mecum, is the Bible. Never before, perhaps, in the history of the world, have two decades brought about such a manifest change in a race. Religion, religionism, forms the staple of his speech by day, and the stuff that his dreams are made of by night.”
Would that the picture was more completely true. But, thank God, it is at least founded on fact. The race is aroused, and in earnest. It is bent on accumulation, education, elevation. The world may pay as little heed to the movement as did the Roman world in the time of Tacitus to the Christian Church in the Eternal City; but the time is not distant when the world will see that this quiet work is one of the great movements of modern history.
CHRISTIAN EDUCATION AT THE SOUTH.
BY REV. WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D.
The problem that confronts us this morning is that which is presented by the illiteracy of this country, and especially of the Southern States. This is not the only problem before this Association; the problem of the irreligion and heathenism which infest many regions also claims our energies. There is moral evil as well as ignorance to be met and fought and overcome. The Association has an evangelical work as well as an educational work in its hands; and though, as we shall see, these two are properly one, yet it is now convenient to consider them separately. It is the educational work that is now before us.
We educate, because education is the servant of a pure religion. We educate, because we are the missionaries of a faith which always adds to itself virtue, and to its virtue knowledge. We educate, because a genuine Christianity always educates; because the work of the pulpit, the work of the Church everywhere must always be, in considerable part, the work of education; but, more especially, we of this Association educate, because the peoples with whom we work are in peculiar need of education; and because nothing but intelligence will ever break the fetters of degrading superstition by which they are held, and lead them forth into the liberty of the sons of God.
We educate, also, because we love our country, and because we believe that there is no other remedy for evils that now threaten her very existence, but the remedy of Christian education. Thus we are brought face to face with the problem of illiteracy. Illiteracy in a republic; what does it signify? It is the creeping paralysis that unnerves its arm; it is the malaria that poisons its blood; it is the cataract that dims and finally destroys its vision; it is the slow decay that consumes its life. Illiteracy, ignorance, in a republic is, and must always be, assailing and undermining its very foundations. It is the natural and deadly foe of free government. No republic can live, no republic ought to live, in which the voters are ignorant. Voting in a republic is governing; and no man has any right to govern me who does not know enough to govern himself. No man has any right to take part in the government of the nation, who has not some notion of what right government is. I protest against such government. I have never consented to the justice of it, and I never will. I do not believe that the State has any right to intrust this responsible business of governing—and voting is governing—to the hands of men who cannot read the ballots that they cast and who have no conception of the duties of a citizen.
But the State has done it; and what has been done cannot be undone by any political methods. It is with the consequences that we have to do. And the consequences are tremendous, appalling to those who stop to consider them. The total number of men of voting age in the Southern States at the last census was 4,154,125. Of these 1,354,974 could neither read nor write. A little more than thirty-two per cent. of the voters of those States were at that time wholly illiterate. Think of that! Almost one-third of all the voters in sixteen States of the Union so ignorant that they cannot write their own names or read the simplest English sentence! And these are our rulers.
I know very well that you will find among these thirteen hundred thousand illiterate voters not a few men of great natural shrewdness and considerable general information, who may be fairly qualified to discharge the duties of citizenship. There are men to whom all print is shut, who can see quite as far into public questions as many of those to whom print is as wide open as it was to Silas Wegg. The alphabet test is by no means an infallible test. Some who could not pass this test are well qualified for citizenship. On the other hand, there are tens of thousands of those who are reported among the literates, who are put down as being able to read and write, and who are yet utterly ignorant. They can manage to scrawl their names, perchance, or to skip and tumble about a little among simple words in a primer: but the reading and writing of which they boast is of no sort of use to them as fitting them to vote intelligently. You would need to add a great many figures to that array in the census if you should state fully the facts in regard to the illiteracy of the Southern States.