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• thing like this would you find, however, in a grade of society

distinctly superior to the lowest at the South.

The ratio of the number of the citizens who cannot read at all to the whole, appears, by the census returns, to be only three times larger at the South than at the North. I believe it to be much greater at the South than these returns indicate.^[1] The comparative education of the third class "North" and of the third class "South," however, cannot be at all judged from these statistics, supposing them correct. Those who can read and who do not read, or whose reading is confined within extremely narrow limits, are a much larger number at the South than at the North, owing to the much poorer supply of books and newspapers which commerce can afford to put within the reach of the former. The census returns two million newspapers, for instance, printed annually in Virginia, one hundred and fifteen million in New York. There is a post-office to every fourteen square miles in New York, one to forty-seven square miles in Virginia; over five hundred publishers and booksellers in New York, but forty in Virginia. Thirty thousand volumes in public libraries in Virginia, eight hundred thousand in New York. The area occupied by the population of Virginia being much the largest, it may be inferred that with the disposition and the ability to read anything in particular, the Virginian of the third class will have to travel more than thirty times as far as the New Yorker to procure it. The same proposition will hold good in regard to most other means of cultivation, and the third

1. The ratio of white illiterate to white population, per cent., as returned, is,

   {Free States, 3.36
   {Slave " 8.27

   of the native population, over twenty years old, it is,

   {Free States, 4.12
   {Slave " 17.23

   Census Compendium, pp. 152, 153). The ability to merely read and write may itself be of little value, but the fact of a child's having had the painstaking necessary to so far instruct him is in some degree a means of measuring his other inherited wealth, and thus his breeding.