The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-03-23
DIR. ALDERMAN
 IS OPTIMISTIC
 FOR THE SOUTH
CONTINUED FROM PAGE l.,

FAkONk PASE Isf
 ---~-------------~----~>-- to this-a spiritual distance of 300 years.
 This is why we who were born in later day think so tenderly of the gray-haired man of the south today. whose heart is imprisoned with hate or. revenge, whose spirit is young and hopeful, and whose devotion to his whole country, which no power now can ever break, is as clear and high as was his faithfulness to the flag which his courage advanced so high and so far. I remember it all dimly as boy at sch ool reciting Father Ryan's Conquered Banner and the mournful threnodies of the period. I remember the sad and subtle, mystery of my fathers face as he sat on his gallery and gazed wistfu1ly over the world which seemed so bright and al- turing to my young spirit. He was striving in middle life to adjust him self to a new world, whose features he could not recognize, and in which he must live and work as he had in the world gone from him forever, amid the flashing of the guns. That he crossed the perilous bridge between tn eeras, safely and strongly, was his best legacy to me. That General Lee as a quiet teacher of youth made the great adjustment so simply, that he somehow contrived in such work to wear defeat like laurel crown, is the chiefest reason for the vast love for him which abides in southe ern hearts.
 Entirely New Energies.
 From 1880, roughly speaking, until ic fn ciH the emergent and growing south. striving to mainsain it's essential social and political traditions, and yet, with a completely altered economic point of view, transferring it's energies from combating and enduring to building and growing
 'Instinctively, as has every renais- sance period, the southern states have expended their chiefest energies oo the most Fundamental of all social tasks-education. It was necessary to understand, to face, and to conquer the following conditions, in order to establish solidly in southern life an enduring system of democratic edu- cation:
 "1. The free public school was not possible in the south during it's years of isolation and submersion, when plantation life, instead of community life, was the unit; when individualism controlled state policy, and slavery ob- structed communal growth.
 "2. The south was rural and sparsely settled, which are the most difficult conditions for the spread of public schools
 "3. The south was bi-racial, involv- ing a duplication of educational ef- fort and a conquest of racial difficult ties.
 A. The south was the overburdened section of America. No CT Ameri- cans have ever known in it's direst form, the discipline of war and defeat. No other region among the great cui- ture nations, not even France, ever lost in less than a decade over one- tenth of it's population three and u half billions of it's wealth, the form of it's society and the very genius of it's life, save a certain unconquerabie courage and self-reliance. No other region except Poland ever knew such losses, and Poland ceased to exist. The year 1900 had come and gone before the south had regained it's per capita wealth of 1860.
 "5. The south must pass from an agricultural order, depressed by pow erty and misrule, to an industrial democracy, wherein it must regain It's national consciousness in a country which itself was just beginning to un- destand what real national self-con- |isciousness meant.
 "6. The character of the citizenship of the south, both the unexploited and backward elements and the old sturdy stocks, sobered by fortitude and woe, promised the richest results in char acter and efficiency to the nation at large.
 "7. There existed in the south an un- taught and backward race, newly and suddenly projected from slavery to citizenship and economic responsibility. 'The state university, the private academy of rare excellence, practical initiative in the education of women, many be considered the chief educa- tional achievement of the ante-bellum south.
 Sum of Accomplishment Since 1880, in spite of the difficulties above enumerated, the south has in creased this sum of accomplishments, in the following directions:
 T. The southern people have had the
 
 turb the only good thing bequeathed to them by the carpet-bag governments, |.ramely, the provisions for popular edu- cation placed in their organic law. "2. They have developed an overwhelm- ing, public sentiment with the social and political agencies necessary to sustain that sentiment in favor of the education of all the people at public expense, thus making of a social system, sem-feudal :n nature, democracy in social usage, as well as in political philosophy. '.3. They have guided that sentiment to the point where 45 per cent of all their public revenues are expended upon edu- cation. They have increased their school revenue, in the past five years, $11,5 ,590,0co, and two-thirds of this sum has come from local taxation, a community weapon of enormous power, formerly dreaded by tho property holders, and hated by the people themselves, to whom 1t was sparingly permitted.
 A. The south has developed the genius of school organization necessary to create a system of popular education in every southern state, fairly complete as to its machinery and methods quickened and strengthened by normal and industrial