The Jeffersonian. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1907-1917, 1913-09-11


taxpayers. In many families there
was enacted for more than the first
time, the agony Of disappointment;
the price of school-books was prohi-
bitiye, and many childish heart
was broken, when it was not found
possible to send all of them to school.
Times may be better by the second
half of the winter term, and it may
be, in the South, the little cotton
pickers will work harder at the
thought of making the needed money
for books and clothes.
The writer of this would gladly
give five years of her life-which
isn't work anything to anyone but
herself-if she could, by any possible
way, ma Q known to people with
money, the tragedy which is enacted
year after year in the South, when
school opens"
For some unknown reason, it is
almost impossible to get the rich
Northern and Western people inter
ested or alive to the fact that there
are poor white children whose ambi-
ton is no less great than that of the
negro children. Close association
and contact with the two races is
probably the only basis on which a
thorough knowledge of the difference
of the degree of ambitions of the two
races may be founded-and this
knowledge is denied the Northern
philanthropist who loses sight of the
fact that the newer of wood and the
drawer of water may play as import
ant a part in the scheme of things
as does the highly educated, and
often misplaced brother who is
hoisted out of his natural environ
ment by that education which is fire.
quently more harmful than benefi-
cial
Georgia has reason to be ashamed
of her record, in two things. She has
been held up in magazine story, in
statistics and in investigations as
the banner State of the South for il
literacy and for the number of child
rem who work, under the most horri-
BILE conditions, we are told, in mills
and factories.
In the South, and especially in
Georgia, We find the purest American
blood. There are communities in
which families may trace their pedi-
gree to the days of the pre-Revolu-
tionary settlements, and it is pity
to have to record that it is the de-
scendants of these early settlers who
are found now to be unable to read
and write and whose children go into
the hopper for the mills to grind
profits for the owners
There have been few people as
patient under what they regard as
existent conditions, as this same class
of Southerners. 1t would be an in
teresting study if some Of our richer
brethren, who insist on building and
endowing schools, colleges and schol-
arships for the ColOred Brother, to
get an intimate view of those poor
whites 1t has pleased the novel
list of many degrees, to make much
in the way of material, of these peo-
pie There are many of them crude
of speech and manner, but there are
many more of them whose language
is as near to pure English as it is
possible to find in this country. Their
manners are simple, dignifed, and
founded on traditions that take one
back to the sturdy English yeomanry,
whom they unfortunately know so
little of, but whose blood puts these
people in class apart. And with
the settling of their native places, or
with the demands which are made
the standard of all-they have been
left behind in what we are pleased
to call "the march of progress" 1t
is when the question OF schooling