Dr.
Wallace Buttrick, the Secretary of the General Education Board, had now decided that the fundamental difficulty was economic.

By that time the Southern people had revised their original conception that education was a private and not a public concern; there was now a general acceptance of the doctrine that the mental and physical training of every child, white and black, was the responsibility of the state; Aycock's campaign had worked such a popular revolution on this subject that no politician who aspired to public office would dare to take a contrary view.

Yet the economic difficulty still remained.

The South was poor; whatever might be the general desire, the taxable resources were not sufficient to support such a comprehensive system of popular instruction as existed in the North and West.

Any permanent improvement must therefore be based upon the strengthening of the South's economic position.