Illiteracy
inability to read and write any language. In the United States the census officers consider those who cannot write, but can read, illiterate.
In the United States inquiry is made of all persons as to their literacy and those persons above 10 years of age who cannot write are considered illiterate.
The European countries differ in their methods of securing their statistics in this matter and the age limit is not always 10 years. Of the European countries, Germany, with but one-half of one per cent. of her population illiterates, heads the list, closely followed by Switz erland. Illiteracy is the greatest in southern and southeastern Europe. In Spain, Portugal, Servia, and Rumania a considerable per cent. of the population, in the case of the last named country country nearly 90 per cent. of the population, is illiterate. While comparison between nations is on an insecure basis due to the different methods of collecting statistics used in the various countries, it is clear that those nations which send the greatest number of immigrants to this country are those with a high proportion of illiterates.
According to the census of 1910 the illiterates in the United States numbered 5,516,163, or 7.7 per cent. of the population. The draft of 1917-1918 revealed a slightly higher percentage, but in the main confirmed the census figures. The greatest percentage of illiteracy is reached among the negroes, who make up 40 per cent. of all the illiterates of the nation; 30 per cent. of the illiterate group are foreign-born whites, 28 per cent. are native whites, and two per cent. of them are Chinese and Indians. As might be expected, the rural population is more illiterate than the city, because of the relative scarcity of schools.
Of the adult male population there are 2,273,603 illiterates, those cities having the greatest percentage of illiterate ILLYRIA males over 21 being Fall River with 15.6, Birmingham with 10.4, Scranton 8.9, Nashville 8.8, Atlanta 8.6, and Richmond 8.2. These cities have this relatively large percentage because of large foreign or negro populations. The five largest cities in the United States compare in the percentage of illiterates above 21 years of age thus: New York 6.4, Chicago 5.1, Philadelphia 4.7, Boston 4.5, St. Louis 4.1. The States having the lowest percentage of illiteracy are Iowa, Nebraska, Oregon and Washington; in all these the percentage is under 2 per cent. The highest percentage of illiteracy is reached in the Southern States with their large negro population, and in those States along the Mexican border:
Louisiana (29.0), South Carolina (25.7), Alabama (22.9), Mississippi (22.4), Arizona (20.9), New Mexico (20.2).
ILLUMINATI (il-yū-mē-nā'ti or ilöm-e-nä-te), a Spanish sect, known vernacularly as Alumbrados. Their founders were Catherine de Jesus, a Carmelite nun, and John de Willelpando, a native of Teneriffe. They rejected the sacraments, and held that by mental prayer they might attain such perfection as to dispense with good works, and that they might commit any crime without sin.
Ignatius Loyola, while a student at Salamanca (1527), was tried by an ecclesiastical commission for sympathy with the views of this sect, but declared innocent. Also an obscure sect of French Familists, which arose in Picardy in 1634.
The Rosicrucians were so called, but generally by this title are designated the members of a society formed at Ingolstadt, in 1776, by Adam Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law, and an ex- Jesuit. It had some resemblance to, and received substantial support from, Freemasonry. Its objects were religious and political emancipation, its ideal form of government republican, and its religion deistic. The order was suppressed by edict, March 2, 1785, and Weishaupt was degraded and banished.