pinos will be in a position to do for themselves what their racial relatives, the Japanese, have done. They will need some guidance, and, of course, in the technical and industrial schools, must be instructed by Americans; but they are ambitious to do for themselves all they possibly can, and they are certainly able to direct their own primary, secondary, and in a large measure their collegiate education. The Filipinos know what they want, and it is not necessary for America to take upon herself the duty of explaining to them wherein their educational system is lacking. The platform issued by the Hong Kong Junta, in April, 1898, before there was any thought of the United States seizing the Archipelago, contained this plank on education:

"We demand a system of public instruction less ecclesiastical, and more diverse in its teaching of exact and natural sciences, so that women as well as men may be able to extend and develop the industries and wealth proper to the country; those on water as well as those on land, mines, forests and industries of every class.

"We demand a system of instruction gratuitous throughout, and compulsory in the elementary grades. Relinquishing and applying to that object all the property proved to have been bequeathed to defray the expenses of education, and placing the administration of the schools in charge of a Board of Public Instruction, without leaving it an instant longer in the care of the religious orders, who hitherto have taught fanatically and prejudicially, proclaiming, as was done by a rector of the University of Manila, a Dominican friar, that 'medicine and natural sciences are materialistic and impious studies,' and asserting as did another rector that political economy is 'the science of the Devil.'

"We demand a system of public instruction that shall include primary and secondary schools, universities competent to grant degrees, normal colleges, professional schools, schools for the general practise and theory of agriculture, to be connected with model farms and farms for experimental agriculture, institutes of the fine arts, commercial and business colleges, museums, libraries, and meteorological observatories. The educational system now in operation in the Philippines is badly organized and disconnected, costing a large amount for its maintenance, without giving those practical results which it ought, owing to the incompetence of the teachers, the disregard of merit in mak

ing appointments, and the disproportionate wages granted to those in favor with the authorities."

The United States has made mistakes in the Philippines because it has not cared to ask for advice from Filipinos competent to give it. The Philippine Islands are not inhabited by savages, but, in a large measure, by persons competent to discuss any subject with the broadest-minded men in Washington. Filipinos have filled the highest offices in Spain, from the Premiership down, and the United States will have to realize this fact before it can be successful in its rule over the Archipelago. The matter of education is of as vital importance to the natives as it is to the success of the American colonial policy. Let the United States, then, give a hearing to the Filipinos before continuing its present course, which even if it does not result disastrously will at least prove useless.

ANTONIO REGIDOR JURADO.

London, England.

THE NEW RACE QUESTION IN THE SOUTH.

ΤΗ

HE negro has ceased to be a "race problem" in the South. The fact that a majority of the Southern States in which the negroes predominate have passed disfranchisement laws, and that the others are taking steps toward that end, has effectually settled the negro question for many years to come, as without civil rights the negro will be more helpless and more miserable in every way, in the future, than during the so-called "dark days" of slavery.

But the South has a new "race question" to face-one that has approached so insidiously, and from so unexpected a quarter, that few persons have realized in it a danger to existing political and social institutions of the South. The South has from the beginning been dominated, socially, politically, and in every other relation of life, by the so-called aristocracy, or, as they are more generally known, the "high-bred" whites. There has not, until recent years, been any account taken of the poor whites, now almost universally denominated the "Crackers." There was no place for them in the economy of the South previous to the War of the Rebellion, as there was no sphere of action into which they could be fitted. Their labor could not compete with the cheaper labor of the slaves, excepting in a few urban occupations, and, being landless, they could not become an agricultural or producing class; hence, they degenerated from the beginning into a besotted, ignorant, and vicious class, living apart in the dense recesses of the pine woods, which then covered the South, multiplying with the usual fecundity of the poverty-stricken, and by the time the war began they comprised a vast majority of the white people of the central and southern portions of that section of our country known as the South.

The origin of the Crackers is lost in obscurity. That they are a people apart from the educated and intelligent “highbred" whites of the South, it needs but a glance to assure the intelligent observer; and the typical one, bred in the back

woods, coming into contact with civilization only by an occasional visit to some cross-roads store for the few necessaries that he cannot pick up in the pine woods, is a sight to impress the observer with the conviction that extreme cases of reversion are possible even to such highly-bred races as the English, Scotch, Irish, and French, whence the Crackers are descended, when any of their members are neglected by civilization for several hundred years.

The most plausible theory as to the origin of the Crackers is that the original ones were the descendants of the "Redemptioners" and convicts, whom Great Britain poured on the shores of the colonies early in their history. No doubt their ranks were from time to time recruited by the addition of large numbers of the criminal and worthless classes, who found congenial surroundings among the lazy Crackers, away from all the restraints of civilization; and there is record of the reversion of people of high culture, who, becoming stranded on the shores of the colonies, gradually drifted away into the woods, only to turn up a century later, in the persons of their descendants, typical Crackers, with family names so degenerated by mispronunciation as to be hardly recognizable.

There has been advanced repeatedly, also, the theory that the two shiploads of Huguenots who were cast away upon the shores of Georgia and Florida, mostly all of whom reached the land in safety but eventually disappeared, were swallowed up in the pine woods and gradually became associated with the mass of the Crackers.

Many of the Crackers (a typical Cracker is one who has not left his home in the pine woods, or been under the influence of education) in these States show unmistakably the Gallic cast of features, and many of their family names are but corruptions of names well known in France at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, such as Gasher for Gaché, Delyou for de L'Eau, Ganney for Gagné, and many others.

Owing to the fact that the services of the Redemptioners were needed in the Northern, non-slave-holding States, as laborers and artisans, they soon became absorbed in the mass of

the people and lost their identity as a separate class; but in the South, after they had worked out their freedom, they were turned adrift, and there being no employment for them they gradually drifted into the woods. At that time a man with a rifle could keep himself in what was then considered comfort.

As the land became cleared into farms and plantations the squatting Crackers were compelled to retire deeper into the woods, until by the time of the Rebellion they were pretty well congested into the sections of the South whose soil was worthless for plantation purposes.

The Cracker had not been prospering as had his high-bred neighbor, the planter, in the period between the Revolution and the Rebellion. As the clearing of the land enhanced the riches of the slave-holder, in inverse proportion it decreased the prosperity and resources of the Crackers of the pine woods. Game gradually became scarce, and many of them were compelled to clear small patches of scrub-land to enable them to raise a few sacks of corn for meal, instead of trading it for pelts; and instead of the game they had to depend more largely on the flesh of the razor-back hog.

When the Rebellion broke out the Crackers were ripe for rapine and murder. Pushed to the very extremity of want by the aggressions of the high-bred whites, and smarting under the insolence of the negroes, who to this day loathe the Crackers with a feeling such as one pariah race always feels for another, they were on the verge of breaking out when, opportunely, the beginning of the war gave a field for the outpouring of their surplus energies, of which the ruling class was glad to take advantage.

As soldiers in the Confederate armies the Crackers were for the first time put to general use by those who had always shunned and neglected them. They were glad of their services, and every device was used to influence them against the North. They were puffed up with pompous pride-made to feel that they were invincible; and, as a further stimulus to exertion on behalf of their masters, they were deluded into considering themselves as "Southern gentlemen!"