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There is nothing better known about Ireland than this fact: that illiteracy is more frequent among the Irish Catholic peasantry than in any other class of the British population; and that especially upon the Irish-speaking peasant does the stigma lie. Yet it is, perhaps, as well to inquire a little more precisely what is meant by an illiterate.
All these things were common knowledge, with almost no attempt at concealment, and indeed little notion that there might be anything reprehensible in such customs. Every one did it, why shouldn't any one? Later experience proved these conditions, as well as nearly 90 per cent. of complete illiteracy, common to all Honduras.
This name tended to perplex them, and in their ignorance and simplicity they hardly knew to which side they owed allegiance. Their illiteracy was extreme. Ignorant of books and isolated in a wild and remote corner of the world, the Acadians knew nothing of affairs, and were totally incompetent to meet the crisis that was soon to come upon them.
Illiteracy was no bar, as to have made it so in a country where barely 10 per cent of the adult males attain to the slender standard of literacy adopted for census purposes would have reduced the electorate to very insignificant proportions, and many Indians who cannot read or write have often quite as shrewd a knowledge of affairs as those who can.
The United States is the most illiterate country in the world that is, of the so-called civilized countries. Of the 5,000,000 illiterates in the United States, 58 per cent. are white and 28 per cent. native whites. Illiteracy not only is the index of inequality of opportunity. It speaks as well a lack of consideration for the children.
There has been forced upon the New South the conclusion that the best way to increase its wealth is to increase the number of educated, intelligent producers, and with this conclusion it realizes that it cannot afford to let two million colored children grow up in hopeless illiteracy. It perceives that its very institutions will be imperiled by such a condition.
In all such commonwealths except Arkansas, Louisiana, Florida, and Mississippi there was an increase in illiteracy among the free blacks. These States, however, were hardly exceptional, because Arkansas and Mississippi had suffered a decrease in their free colored population, that of Florida had remained the same, and the difference in the case of Louisiana was very slight.
Nor must we be unmindful of the need of improvement among our own citizens, but with the zeal of our forefathers encourage the spread of knowledge and free education. Illiteracy must be banished from the land if we shall attain that high destiny as the foremost of the enlightened nations of the world which, under Providence, we ought to achieve.
The story of what was accomplished in a campaign for the elimination of illiteracy in Rowan County, one of the most backward mountain counties in Kentucky, is both picturesque and instructive.
Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.
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