The Native Virginian

THE PEABODY FUND.

The Peabody Southern Education Fund is apparently being distributed to the best advantage. Such is the assurance of its judicious employment that, beside the large gifts of books which several publishing firms have made, further donations of varying sums are being made to it, so that the New Orleans correspondent of The Mobile Sunday Times announces that in no long time the fund will have become $2,000,000. Already, he says, the schools are getting as much real benefit as could have been purchased by three or four millions in cash on any other system.

The plan has been to require each parish or township to make up two-thirds the amount required for the support of its schools, the agent permitting rent of buildings and unpaid dues from poor pupils to be reckoned as cash, and the trustees of the Peabody fund, through their general state agent, supplying the remaining third.

We clip the above from a stray newspaper which has fallen into our hands. Are the statements correct? So far as we know, the Fund and Peabody himself might as well be in the moon for all the good the Fund is doing in this section. Who has seen a school on the Fund plan? Who knows of a school which expects to be helped by the Fund?

Opposed as we are to free schools, we want to see the whites educated as well as the negroes, but not in the same school house or by the same schoolmasters. We entreat our brethren of the Piedmont Press, from Alexandria to Lynchburg, to bestir themselves in this matter.

Too much time has been lost already.