The nation as such abolished slavery as a legal institution; but ignorance is slavery, and no matter what is written in your constitutions and your laws, slavery will continue until intelligence, handmaid of liberty, shall have illuminated the whole land with the light of her smile.
Before the war the Southern States were aristocracies, highly educated, and disciplined in the science of polities.
Hence they preserved order and flourished at home, while they imposed their will upon the nation at large.

Now all is changed.

The suffrage is universal, and that means universal ruin unless the capacity to use it intelligently is created by universal education.

Until the republican constitutions, framed in accordance with the Congressional reconstruction which supplanted the governments initiated by President Johnson, common-school systems, like universal suffrage, were unknown.

Hence in a special manner the nation is responsible for the existence and support of those systems as well as for the order of things which made them necessary.