except civil-service reform, of which it is a vital part. Among the 1,137,311 illiterate adults in the South, what a mass of ignorant voters! What a factor in elections! Untutored, non-property-holding voters are tools for demagogues, and make "machine politics" easy of application. Seven hundred thousand illiterate voters can make governors, congressmen, and Presidents; can decide great questions of national policy, exert an influence coextensive with the Union, and are themselves eligible to offices of trust and honor. I have myself heard appeals to colored voters, pressed pertinaciously and successfully, based on the ground that they were neither legally nor morally bound to pay a public debt contracted before they were citizens.

Slavery has been pronounced to be a gross blunder. Terrible as was the war, it has had much compensation in the liberation of the slaves. Emancipation, however, has not regenerated the race, nor qualified them for the discharge of the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. The elective franchise is not a universal catholicon; has no talismanic virtue: but it implies the possession of intelligence, an appreciation of the value of free institutions, and the courage and virtue to sustain and perpetuate them. This is a "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." The ballot is the freeman's prerogative. It is

stronger than bayonets. It should be conjoined with patriotism, knowledge, and integrity: it often represents passion, prejudice, ignorance, crime. President Garfield, in his inaugural, spoke of a free ballot as of priceless importance, and worthy, for its security, of the exercise of all federal and State power. So say we all. But for a ballot to be free, it must be the symbol, not of stupidity, superstition, corruption, intimidation, but of exalted ideas, pure principles, and intelligent comprehen. sion of its uses and ends. A ballot may be the despotism of ignorance, faction, and organized

meanness.

When England enlarged the franchise in 1867, Sir Robert Lowe said the first duty and interest of England was to educate its masters. Illiteracy is a present, pervasive, and potential peril. It threatens the overthrow of free institutions. It is a corrosive malady poisoning the vitals of the government. No evangel of "dynamite and dagger" is the cure for this political pyæmia, but widely diffused, universal education, in alliance with Christian morality.

The removal of this mass of illiteracy cannot be effected by private benefactions, by denominational and State activities. The power and resources of the federal government should come to the aid of the States, unable of themselves to meet this emergency. This is a national question, more im

perative than Mormonism or Chinese immigration or a Presidential election: unless rightly solved, we may have no President to elect. Let me reaffirm with emphasis, as an educator, a patriot, an American, that on universal education, on free schools, depend the prosperity of the country and the safety and perpetuity of the Republic. The highest duty of a government is self-preservation.

LECTURE VII.

THE SOUTH AT SCHOOL.

BY REV. A. D. MAYO, MASSACHUSETTS.

HE word of the Lord (which in my copy of the "improved version" includes the command of our honored president of the American Institute of Instruction) came to me last week, resting under the maples of Wellesley, saying, "Gird up the loins of your mind and go to St. Albans, to stand in the place of one whom everybody is always eager to hear, and try to make the people forget that he is away." The foremost virtue of a good schoolman is a reasonable consent to be "supervised"; and after ten years' training by Secretary Dickinson, who is said to have supervision on the brain, I have at least learned the art of swift and gracious obedience. So I am here, not to stand in anybody's place, or to make anybody's speech save that which is given me to deliver on my own account. To ask me to compass the height of the grand theme assigned to Judge Tourgee would be like a

summons to a tired man, on the piazza of a Lake Placid hotel, to spring up at a moment's warning and scale the rocky ramparts of Mount Whiteface. I shall attempt no enterprise so hazardous as that.

It was suggested by our president that I should' “tell my experience" concerning my journeyings during eight months of the past year, through nine of the Southern States, on what I hope it is not vanity to call a "ministry of education." Certainly there is enough to tell about this, the most interesting and the happiest year of my life. But when I begin to collect my reminiscences, I realize that you have been instructed this afternoon by one of the most distinguished representatives of education in the South; one who knows all that is worth telling of its past schooling, and who must know more than all of us concerning its present condition, aspirations, aptitudes, and pathetic necessities. I certainly shall not presume to repeat his words, and shall not attempt to speak in any positive or compendious way on the mighty theme, Education in the South. And when I would tell the little story of my own wanderings up and down a land which, even under the leaden skies of last winter, had always sunshine. enough to build a pathway of light for one of its visitors, I am more at a loss than ever what to say. For on looking back over these months of pleasant occupation, I feel that much that I heard and