Viewing page 126 of 240

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

(3)

work for a longer time than a day, some will engage for a week, some by the month and some few, but very few, by the year. The great majority will not engage in regular profitable labor, they prefer cultivating small crops, by which they make not enough bread or meat and they idle away the balance of their time in walking about hunting and gunning or in fishing in the river and ponds by which they can earn literally nothing as there is very little or no game and no one in this country has ever made any thing by fishing in our waters - It cannot be expected by any one at all familiar with the negro race, that the present generation of grown up blacks can even be educated, so as to beget in them a sufficient self respect and self reliance as to make them either intelligent or useful citizens The young may possibly, or rather might be improved if they can be properly cared for, whilst they are young. But can this most desirable end be attained if they remain with their ignorant and idle parents? I confess I do not think it can. I know full well that before the late war, the managers of the school-fund of this state, and the fund was then large but has been entirely destroyed, so that there is not now a dollar left, reported to the legislature that the poor children were being educated and benefited by it, yet in a long and active life I never knew one child who had been benefited by that fund or that system - The system was radically