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Would it not be wise, just, and statesmanlike, for the nation to give financial aid to the tremendous work of public education with which the South is struggling? The Blair bill for this purpose, in a word, an appropriation of $100,000,000, running through ten years, on the basis of illiteracy, came very near success in Congress.
Mrs. Draper made a humorously exaggerated gesture of despair and turned to Sylvia. "Well, it's just as well, my dear, that you should know at the very beginning what a perfect monster of illiteracy he is! You needn't expect anything from him but his stupid good-looks, and money and fascination. Otherwise he's a Cave-Man for ignorance. You must take him in hand!" She turned back to the man.
In Germany also, especially in Prussia, there have long been thorough provisions for the instruction of all the young in elementary branches. In France, in consequence of the laws requiring primary schools in all the communes of any considerable size, the average of illiteracy has of late steadily diminished. In 1881, in France, instruction in the public primary schools was made absolutely free.
In places where the blacks once had the privilege of getting an elementary education, only an inconceivable fraction of them could rise above illiteracy. Most of these were freedmen found in towns and cities. With the exception of a few slaves who were allowed the benefits of religious instruction, these despised beings were generally neglected and left to die like heathen.
The State-controlled professor, parson and moving-picture producer appeal to limited audiences in halls and churches, but the newspaper is ubiquitous, particularly in a country where illiteracy is practically unknown, and where regulations bidding and forbidding are constantly appearing in the newspapers the reading of which is thus absolutely necessary if one would avoid friction with the authorities.
Still the life of the great majority in the United States was less grinding than that of Europeans of the same class, and the opportunity for a poor man to rise in the social and economic scale was distinctly better. That is what made America the Mecca of so many thousands during the decade of 1850-60. Yet illiteracy and dependency, causes and results of poverty, were almost appalling.
Thus, in 1907 among the French it was only 4 per cent; among the Germans, 4 per cent; Irish, 3 per cent; English, 2 per cent; and Scandinavians, less than 1 per cent. Connected more or less with this fact of illiteracy is the number in our population who cannot speak English.
I don't think its phrasing and illiteracy are affected; I think it has been written in its present colloquial form without art or design, by whoever wrote it; it is written, phrased, expressed, precisely as a vulgar, coarse sort of person would speak. That is the first point. The second is it is typewritten.
They are clannish, tend to form colonies of their own race in which their language, customs, and ideals are preserved. This is especially true of the illiterate immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. As we have already seen, the rate of illiteracy among certain of our recent immigrants is so high that they can scarcely be expected to participate in our social life.
"Which was that you took him in hand." "No which is, that he springs from stock that, despite its hundred years of lapse into illiteracy, is good stock. Samson South was a gentleman, Wilfred, two hundred years before he was born." "That," observed her companion, curtly, "was some time ago." She tossed her head, impatiently. "Come," she said, "let's gallop."
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