The Southern States represented the purest "Anglo-Saxon" strain in the United States; to-day in North Carolina only one person in four hundred is of "foreign stock," and a voting list of almost any town contains practically nothing except the English and Scotch names that were borne by the original settlers.

Yet here democracy, in any real sense, had scarcely obtained a footing.

The region which had given Thomas Jefferson and George Washington to the world was still, in the year 1897, organized upon an essentially aristocratic basis.

The conception of education which prevailed in the most hide-bound aristocracies of Europe still ruled south of the Potomac.

There was no acceptance of that fundamental American doctrine that education was the function of the state.