HOW SHALL THE COLORED YOUTH OF THE SOUTH BE EDUCATED?

By A.D. Mayo.Next to the preservation of the Union the most notable result of the great Civil War was the emancipation of more than six millions of Negroes and their sudden and perilous elevation, in defiance of all historic precedents, from the lowest to the highest position in modern civilizations,--complete legal citizenship of the United States. For more than thirty years the people of the old fifteen slave states have been wrestling with the problem of bringing the actual condition of these new citizens into conformity with their legal civic status as recorded in the Constitution and laws of every American commonwealth. By common consent the only lever that can lift this nation within a nation to its final position in American life is found in that group of agencies which, "working together for good," is know as education. The present essay is an attempt to outline the educational status of the American negro citizen in our Southern states, and to suggest some of the more evident and imperative methods by which the great educational movement of the colored race, begun with its emancipation in 1865, can now be reorganized in the light of past experience and carried forward to a successful issue.

But first let me indicate the point of view from which this observation and estimate are taken.

1. I trace the direct hand of God's providence in the removal of this people from the darkness of pagan barbarism and bondage in the "dark continent," amid the comparative darkness of Christendom three hundred years ago, to a new continent, destined to become the seat of the world's chief republic. No other portion of this race, either in Africa or elsewhere, has at any time been so favored by divine Providence as in this calling out of Egypt, at the beginning of a forty years in the wilderness, in the journey toward the land of promise.

2. I trace the hand of God through the two hundred and fifty years of the life of this people in the English colonies and the southern United States before its final emancipation, a generation ago. I have no apologies for its darker shades, and make no claim for the "peculiar institution" as a missionary enterprise. But this I see: While the masses of the European peoples, without exception, came up to their day of deliverance through a thousand years of war, pestilence and famine, which destroyed as many as now live on that continent, this people was trained for civilization through a prolonged childhood under the direction and by the consent of the superior class in the most progressive nation on earth. This is the only people that has made the passage from barbarism to civilization without passing through a wilderness dominated by the three furies of the prayer-book,--"sword, pestilence and famine." Up to 1860 it never strewed the continent with its bones or watered its fields with its blood in war. Its people never died in thousands, like every European people, by famine. And so well were they guarded against pestilence that no people on earth has so increased and multiplied, until to-day we behold a nation three times as numerous as the American republic under the presidency of George Washington.

0003214

3. When at last the republic, like every great people, was called upon to make the grand decision whether it was indeed one nation or a confederacy of thirty nations which one of the number could sever, this people was providentially so placed that neither the Union nor the confederacy could boast that it had received the greater aid at its hands. Among the three million soldiers and sailors of the Union, at most were found not more than a quarter of a million of colored fighter and workers. But until the close of the great conflict the confederacy received the aid of probably five millions of the colored people, in raising supplies, carrying on the home life, and working in the various ways whereby the effective strength and number of its armies was prodigiously increased. And it was no small gain for the freedmen that, when peace and freedom came, every generous and thoughtful family in the South acknowledged a debt of gratitude to them and laid no charge against them for what had happened. Meanwhile, the North and the nation, which had liberated the slaves as an act of civil war, felt bound by every consideration of justice and humanity to do its uttermost for their protection and elevation.

4. And when the war cloud lifted and the six millions of this people stood up for the first "dress parade" of the grand army of freedmen, the whole civilized world looked on with amazement at what appeared. For during that period of less than three centuries the race had made a greater progress than any other people in the history of mankind. During those memorable years the African negro had learned the three fundamental lessons of civilization: How to work under intelligent supervision; the language and the religion of a civilized, Christian country. And that country was the world's foremost republic, and all the experiences of slave life had been during the years when it was growing from thirteen colonies to the United States of America. It was not remarkable, under those circumstances, that among these five or six millions was found a body of men and women who became the foremost leaders of the race, by the natural selection of superior intelligence, superior character and superior character and superior executive ability. Freedom came to the Negro in a country by climate adapted to his condition; where good land was a drug in every market; so fertile that no family need starve; so sparsely populated that one of its states to-day could support the entire colored population of eight millions and still call aloud for millions more.

5. I do not discuss the wisdom or unwisdom of the last great act of this "strange eventful history"--the conferring on this people at once the world's highest opportunity--the supreme right of full American citizenship world's highest opportunity--the supreme right of full American citizenship, with all that belongs thereto. But I see that, under the same directing providence, even this, the most daring and perilous experiment in government recorded in history, awoke the entire country at once to the necessity and duty of providing that education for the coming generation without which freedom itself would have been only a mockery and a phantasm.

At once the national government stretched forth its hand to the two millions of colored children and youth. The great philanthropist, George Peabody, born and reared in the common schools of Massachusetts, a citizen of the South, a resident in and illustrious benefactor of the metropolis of the British empire, included the Negro children in the greatest personal gift at that time ever made for the education of a whole people. The board of Peabody trustees, the most distinguished body of men that ever served as a "common school board of education," under the presidency of Robert C. Winthrop, the descendant of Governor John Winthrop, the most illustrious of his great family, the model American citizen; through its right and left hand, Dr. Barnas Sears and Dr. J.L.M. Curry, invited the South to make its 0004215final effort to establish the common school for "every sort and condition" of its people. And, most wonderful of all the wonders of this era of miracles, the old master class of the South joined hands with the educational public of the North in the glorious enterprise of educating the children of its freedmen for the new American citizenship. All honor to the North and the nation for what it has done in giving to this people the greatest opportunity, to train its superior youth for the leadership of a nation. But we must not forget that for every dollar expended form the marvelous wealth of the richest nation and the wealthiest states of Christendom in behalf of the Negro the sixteen states of the South, in the day of their poverty, have given four dollars for the education of these children in the new Southern common schools.

6. So here our "nation within a nation" stands to-day. The North and the republic have given the Negro personal emancipation and, as far as constitutions and laws can go, political freedom. But the only highway to the real use and enjoyment of complete American citizenship is the education of the head, the heart and the hand, which leads a people through the paths of peace and by the methods of a Christian civilization, up from every possible depth to every possible height of human achievement. The South has struck hands once and forever with the North and the nation, and in the establishment and support of the American common school, at a cost, during the past twenty-five years, of more than four hundred and eighty-three million dollars for its colored citizens,--has done such a work as no people under similar circumstances ever did before.

The only question now in order is: in view of what God and the Republic have done, what does this people propose to do for itself? What must this "nation within a nation" do to be saved?

I answer, without one word of hesitation: Turn its back upon the past. Return thanks to Almighty God that it now stands on the threshold of the world's highest position, sovereign citizenship in the world's greatest republic. Let it behold in this opportunity for the education of the two millions of its children and youth in the American common school, the final proof of the gracious providence that "thus far has let it on." Now let it gird up its loins, face the sunrise, and along this highway of civilization begin its upward march toward the future that can only be achieved through that education which is but another name for the Christian method of rising out of the lower places of the earth toward the sunlit summits that front the heavens and scan the horizon.

With the best light at my command I therefore hold that the absolute impending duty of the colored citizens of the South is to combine and by every practical method inaugurate a grand revival in behalf of the country and village common school.

The graded school for colored children and youth in the cities and larger towns in these states is now in a fair way to success. But it is in the vast majority of the common schools for the colored children and youth, in the open country and smaller villages, that the great field for educational work in the south is now found.

By the report of the National Bureau of Education for 1892-93 we learn that in sixteen states and the District of Columbia there are now (estimated) 2,630.331 colored children between the ages of five and eighteen. Of these 1,267,828 are enrolled in the common schools. The average daily attendance varies in different states; in Virginia one-half, in South Carolina a larger, in Maryland a smaller proportion; in the District of Columbia, where the colored schools are best, 11,000 of the 14,500 enrolled. It would probably be an approximate estimate to say that one-third the number of colored children in the South between five and 0005216eighteen are in average daily attendance on common schools, in session than five and rarely four months in the year, during a period probably not exceeding four years in the life of the pupil. These children are under the instruction of 25,615 colored teachers.

"In the academies, schools, colleges, etc., for colored youth there are, as far as known, 10,191 male and 11,920 female students. In all these schools reported in 1892-93 there are 25,859 students. In the elementary departments of seventy-five of these institutions are 13,176 pupils; in the secondary 7,365; in the collegiate, 963; and in professional 924. In the collegiate department of these institutions only twenty-five per centage of colored illiteracy of persons above the age of ten in 1890 was found in Alabama; 69.1 per cent. During the twenty years from 1870 to 1890 the per centage of colored illiteracy was reduced from 85 to 60 per cent of the entire population. In Kentucky the colored school enrolment has reached 78 per cent of the colored youth of school age, while in nine states it falls below 60 per cent. Alabama, with the exception of three states, is giving education to the largest number of colored children in secondary schools. In the number of colored students in normal school courses in 1895 Alabama led the entire South, with 785; also in the number of colored students receiving industrial training, 3,427. It is estimated that the Hampton school in Virginia and the Tuskegee in Alabama now receive nearly one-half the entire sum contributed by the North for the education of the Southern Negro; more than three hundred dollars annually. But, with the best effort of the National Bureau of Education, owing to a chronic habit of neglect in forwarding school returns, these statistics of Negro education can be regarded as little better than a tolerable accurate approximation. Other estimates give in the entire South, 162 schools of the secondary and higher type, with 37,000 students and 1,550 teachers. But at the highest estimate, of probably 800,000 colored children and youth in daily school attendance, not 50,000 will be found in any grade above the elementary and lower grammar schools.

If these institutions, especially those largely supported by the North for the secondary and higher schooling of the colored youth in all these states are wise in time and correctly gauge the drift of sentiment in the educational and religious public in the nation, they will at once do four things:--

1. With all possible despatch consistent with existing arrangements they will relieve themselves of their elementary department and concentrate their work on the raining of competent youth for leadership in all the positions where superior ability and character are in demand.

2. These institutions are waking up to the importance of giving better instruction and in many cases improving the quality of their teaching force.

3. They will co-operate, to the extent of their ability and with a heart in their co-operation, in the attempt to make sound industrial training for both sexes, not an annex to, but a permanent feature of their course of study and discipline.

4. They will discourage the attempt of some of our Southern educational missionary associations and home churches to force the sectarian parochial system of elementary schools upon the colored people.

With these four reforms these institutions can rely upon the continued favor of the friends of education throughout the country; at present for temporary supplies, and finally for substantial endowment, to establish the them as the future collegiate and professional seminaries for this people.

So we are thrown back upon our fundamental position,--the almost absolute dependence of the colored people of the South upon the country district and village common school of the generation of children 0006217and youth now on the ground. More than ninety-five per cent of these two million six hundred thousand, from five to eighteen, will there receive the schooling that will largely determine their ability, twenty years hence, to become the American Macedonian phalanx, the chosen ten thousand on which our "nation within a nation" must depend for its direction in all public and private affairs.

Hitherto, this work of education, including a good deal of aid and comfort for the colored churches, has borne very largely upon the white people of both sections of the country. There are no very reliable statics of the amount of money contributed by the whole country to the schooling of the colored people during the past thirty-five years. It will probably not be very wide of the truth to say that from the outbreak of the Civil War not less than one hundred and ten million dollars has been paid for this purpose. Of this eighty-five million has been expended by the people of the South for the education of the colored children and youth in the common school, and not less than twenty-five million by the national government and churches and people of the states that remained in the Union in 1862.

Probably no hundred million dollars was never expended anywhere with better results. Nothing that has happened south of Mason and Dixon's line since the foundation of the government has been honorable to the leading class of the South as the voluntary contribution of the eighty-five million dollars, under the peculiar condition of the American common school for the children of their former bondmen.

But, as a grim old railroad president once remarked to me, as he very leisurely extracted a five-dollar fold coin from his vest pocket as his contribution to my "ministry of education," I don't take much stock in trying to educate two million of Southern children by passing round a hat." Our nation within a nation must realize, as its educated leaders everywhere declare, that the present condition of affairs is temporary and cannot be prolonged without danger of a decided reaction, not only among the benevolent people of the North, but from the roundabout common sense of the American people. The conviction is abroad, even in a more dangerous from in the South than elsewhere, that a people, eight millions strong, virtually the reliable laboring class of a dozen great states, which from a condition of absolute poverty in 1865, in thirty years has gathered together $300,000,000 of taxable property; the church property of one religious denomination amounting to nine million dollars; the majority of its intelligent, moral and industrial people to-day handling more money than the settlers of New England during the first half-century of their occupation; its average church and social gatherings displaying a better style of dress than entire classes of people in all the states; with the sympathy of Christendom behind it; should not so largely as at present rely on the prodigious system of solicitation that makes every Northern city from June to October a lively imitation of a new administration. Ordinary even "sanctified" human nature, cannot forever endure this tremendous pressure.

It is useless to ignore or in any general way to attempt to resist this impression, or to evade the danger of its becoming more influential in certain sections of the country.

The question comes louder every year: "Why cannot the colored people themselves do more to build their own school system, which is practically their one reliance for the training of the generation of their children now on the ground? Why do their people of means so often ignore their own public schools and spend their money on expensive schools and seminaries elsewhere, or even inferior schools at home ? And why do so many of these more prosperous families compel their most valuable school 0007218men and women, who are needed at their posts of home service, to wear out their lives in tramping from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Lakes to the Gulf, beseeching the gift of student aid, which, if applied in their home common schools, would give an additional month of instruction to fifty children instead of supporting one Common school pupil in a "university?"

I repeat,--I see no help in this emergency save by a great revival in behalf of the common school among the colored masses of all these states. That revival must be led by the teachers and the educational public,--that portion of this people which appreciates the situation and feels the tremendous issues impending on the response to the demand. No political party in state or nation, no system of evangelization in any or all of the churches; no new departure of private benevolence can meet the emergency. There is no other way under heaven known among men" whereby this nation within a nation "can be saved"; as far at its salvation concerns its earthly destiny, except by a great awakening among these eight millions aroused by their own trusted and most influential leaders; not a revival that comes as a cyclone and leaves a spiritual wreck in its wake; but an intelligent, far reaching, practical awakening of whole communities, counties, cities, states; "growing while men sleep"; extending from commonwealth to commonwealth; giving the partisan politician notice to be "up and doing" and every enemy of the common school a "fearful looking for of judgment," until it compels the "power that be" to provide for the training of the young American Negro for the momentous duties already thundering at the door.

"The way to resume specie payments is to resume," said Horace Greeley while the statesmen at Washington were pounding their solemn brows over the financial problem of twenty-five years ago. Booker T Washington, after his own vivid practical manner of speech, has told us the way in which this work was done in one case:

"Ten years ago a young man born in slavery found his way to the Tuskegee school. By small cash payments and work on the farm he finished the course with a good English education and a practical and theoretical knowledge of farming. Returning to his country home, where five-sixth of the citizens were colored, he still found them mortgaging their crops, living on rented land from hand to mouth, and deeply in debt. School had never lasted longer than three months, and was taught in a wreck of a log cabin by an inferior teacher. Finding this condition of things, the young man took the three months public school as a starting point. Soon he organ organized the older pupils into a club that came together every week. In these meetings the young man instructed as to the value of owning a home, the evils of mortgaging, and the importance of educating their children. He taught them how to save money, how to sacrifice-to live on bread and potatoes until they could get out of debt, beginning buying a home and stop mortgaging. Through the lessons and influence of these meetings the first year of this young man's work these people built up by their contributions in money and labor a nice farm school-house that replaces the wreck of the cabin. The next year this worked continued, and those people, out of their own pockets, added two months to the original three-months school term. Month by month has been added to the school term till it now lasts seven months every year. Already fourteen families within a radius of ten miles have bought and are buying homes, a large proportion have ceased to mortgage their crops and are raising their own food supplies. In the midst of all was the young teacher with a model cottage and a model farm as an example and a center of light for the whole community."

In all save exceptional cases, at first by private contributions, and ultimately by some method of local taxation, it may be possible to extend the common school in the country and village of the South even for two or three months; put the school-house in better repair, insist on a more competent teacher, and generally to lift up the entire business of country school-keeping to an assured and progressive condition.

Nowhere in this republic is an able, religious, tactful, dead-in-earnest 0008219young man or woman so powerful for good as the Thousands of teachers in the colored schools of the sixteen states once called the South. Any state association of colored teachers in five years could place their state as far in advance of its present position in the people's common school as it is to-day beyond the old field-school of the grandfathers.

Now, if any reliable or competent man or woman would appear in any metropolitan city of the North or South, properly indorsed and supported, bringing the "good news" that five hundred country and village common schools districts of the colored people of any of these states would, this coming year, by voluntary contribution, raise each the sum of twenty-five dollars that would furnish the salary of one good teacher indorsed by a principal of a state normal school for one additional month's instruction for its thirty to fifty children, I believe an additional twelve thousand five hundred dollars could be raised in a month and all these fifteen to twenty-five thousand pupils receive two additional months of instruction from a teacher who teaches and does not "fumble" with his little consistency.

This proposition is no visionary theory of my own. During my entire ministry of education in the South, since 1880, I have never asked a Southern community to do what many other Southern communities, no better off than itself, had not successfully done. Hundreds of district schools in all these states are thus being improved by the voluntary contributions of their own people, often assisted from without. I am convinced that if this method of local aid were organized and thoroughly tried, with the indorsement of responsible educators in both sections, it would become not only a success, but one of the most poplar methods of giving aid and comfort where most needed by the colored people.

There is yet another reason for the inauguration of this people's grand revival in the interest of the children and youth of their nation within a nation.

The American people's common school is a public university of good manhood, good womanhood, good citizenship in a republican government and order of society. It is from beginning to end an arrangement "of the people, for the people, by the people," acting through a flexible majority, for educating the children in the great American art of living together; each pupil acquiring the mastery of his own mental, moral and executive faculty in preparation for a responsible and inspiring career of full American citizenship at the coming of legal manhood or womanhood. Here the people organize, support and, through responsible officials elected by a legislative school board, teach and train their own children. The pupil is neither a slave under a schoolmaster, nor the subject of a government his parents did not create and control. He is a "minor" citizen, in training for his "majority" in a miniature commonwealth, whose "rules and regulations" are the laws enacted or approved by a popular body and administered by a teacher responsible to the people for every act within his jurisdiction.

Here for this time the child steps out from the limited and exclusive life of the family, where he is often the "all in all," into the broad society of a little republic where no superiority in the wealth, ability culture, social, personal or public positions of his family tells on his standing among his fellows. As in his future life, he stands for himself and rises or falls according to his own personal merit or demerit.

Another superiority of the American common school over all its rival is that it is no less a seminary for the adult people than for the adult people than for the children. Before the year 1860 several of the states of the South endeavored to put on the ground the public school system for the white race devised by Thomas Jefferson, at the time of its publication in some ways the broadest and most enlightened that had appeared in this 0009220or any land. Although the South was not lacking in good scholars, farsighted educational statesmen, and an increasing body of superior people, who realized the peril to the lower class of its population from the illiteracy that like a great pestilential slough, there as in Europe, festered at the bottom of society, there was never satisfactory or permanent result until the close of the war.

All these interesting experiments were finally stranded on the most dangerous reef in the old-time Southern order of society,--the lack of efficient local government. The old-time system of government in the wide, sparsely settled district of a Southern county was at best a government at long range, always in danger of falling into the hands of a court-house "ring" at the country town; in many ways the feeblest possible arrangement.

The most beneficent and powerful influence was the social and moral power exerted by the superior families,--one of the ablest and best of the aristocratic families in Christendom, held together by one central interest, the preservation of the social and political order of which it was the head. This arrangement did good service through the first half-century transition period of the republic and produced a state of affairs that some of its literary admires even now laud as the golden age of Southern American society. There was little vagrancy, for the colored folk were under the strict police control of the plantation; the poor white man of the district was an easy-going dependent; and the non-slave-holding farmer generally lived in a different portion of the state.

Thomas Jefferson early saw the peril of a such a condition and urged Virginia to adopt the New England system of town local government, which in a modified form, was afterwards extended to the new Northwest.

But that was then possible. The coming of emancipation found the vast rural districts of this section almost destitute of local government, with the drift of the civil war and the criminal and vagrant class of its six millions of freedmen afloat; with no effective labor laws to protect the children from the ignorance or greed of the patent or the tyranny of the corporation; no efficient vagrant law to save the open country from the nuisance and peril of the idle, vicious, depraved, often fiendish tramp who wandered about at his own wicked will until he ran against an indignant man with a shotgun or an infuriated mob, too crazy with drink and revenge to await the slow motion of a trial in a court, where a swarm of furious criminal lawyers were bound to move heaven and earth in defense of the most flagrant offender.

A potent cure of this and other disorders of the present rural Southern society is the building up of a more efficient style of local government; so that in every neighborhood may be found a body of people accustomed to public activity and administration; not merely voting in a fiercely contested election, but making and administering public ordinances for their own protection and the development of all the conditions of a well-ordered state.

This course must be the growth of a generation. But, meanwhile, as by a special political providence, the beginning of this great movement has already come to the Southern people in the establishment and administration of the people's country and village district school.

This school, although a part of the educational system of the state and still to a large extent dependent on the state for support, is a fact a little republic set up in a limited area of territory through the entire vast rural domain of these sixteen states. Here the people may and often do elect their own local board of school trustees, who administer the school law of the state and supervise the school which contains a representative of every style of family in the district. The school house becomes a little state house, the one centre of the local public life. Every family that sends a child in interested 0010221in it as in no political party, church or secret society. The goings-on therein are watched as nothing else is watched in the neighborhood. Its teacher is the "observers." Every good boy is known and encouraged; every bad boy is "spotted"; every superior girl aspiring to the dignity of a school mistress is "booked" for Tuskegee Hampton, Claflin or one of the one hundred and sixty-two superior institutions where she may be educated into all of which she is capable.

The people, already possessed of additional public influence, will more and more seek to have their way in this great pubic function. Her they are trained to act together for the most important public interest, the education of their own children. The public life that revolves about the little school house is of the most valuable and stimulating sort. It need have none of the vulgarity and ferocity of partisan political contest. It can dispense with the sectarian fury and superstitious fanaticism that too often make a devil's normal school of a quarrelsome church. It steers clear of the bitter rivalries of social ambition; for the child of the humblest mother may become the foremost leader of his race.

What a people's university can this school be made! It is set up in sight of every man's door, always waiting to be improved, able by the self-sacrifice and enlightens cooperation of its families to become anything good they demand. It is the most radical and powerful training school of young and old America for the new republic that we all will face with the rising sun if the twentieth century. It only needs that the people of every school district in all these states rise to the occasion; take the schools into their own hands: if the legislature will not permit them under the law, improve it by calling in the gospel of putting their own shoulder to the wheel, turning their backs to the politicians and doing the work themselves. Nobody will care or dare to resist any sensible, practical, persistent effort of the people in any country or village school district in the South to make its school the best in the country, in the state, in nation.

No Southern Legislature will permanently refuse to come to the relief of a country school system when the people are straining every nerve to make the best of a hard situation and send up a plea to the capitol for aid and encouragement for the children. And, better yet, any people of any state in the Union that goes on educating itself after this fashion, in the self-helping American way of doing business, as it can in the management of the people's common school, will sooner or later become a body politic that no statesman, even the cross=roads politician, can safely offend or ignore,--a constituency that will know just what it needs, and just how to get what it wants, in the direct, peaceful, obstinate American way. A people so trained will vote, and be apt to vote right, especially on education, and that vote will be counted. And every aspirant "in a strait" for an office will look that way,and every patriotic and thoughtful man will rejoice that this glorious right of suffrage, given to our "nation within a nation," has finally become a public blessing, the bulwark of the children's right to education in the people's common school.

The colored teachers must become the leaders in the great revival of the country district and village common school. The young colored man or woman graduate from any of the superior seminaries of the race, especially if his instruction has been a reality and not a sham, if he rally knows what he has studied and can ell what he knows, and, beyond his function as a pedagogue, has a broad and generous outfit of intelligent, moral and executive manhood or womanhood, at once may become a missionary of the higher Christian civilization to the entire community.

The colored schools of the Southern country and village need a larger number 0011222of well qualified women teachers. The colored woman seems endowed by nature with a genius and faculty for the care of children. Amid all the discord and mutual political defamation of the last thirty years, the first Southern man in his sober senses, is yet to be found who has presumed in public to raise his voice against his colored "Mammy." Repeat that venerable name in the Congress of the United States and freshet of eloquence will burst all the barriers that even Speaker Reed could pile up, and a score of "great statesmen" will again become a mob of juvenile wildcats in praise of a loving black "mammy" who sunk herself so deep down into their hearts that she could never be forgotten. Now send the granddaughter of that woman of the old time to a good school; help her to drink deep from the fountains of the new education, and put her in charge of the children in the country school house; and there will come a revival that will blossom like the flowery April that reigns in glory in the opening Southern spring.

Of course a great need of the Southern Negro youth is a training in the new industrial education.

I say "new industrial education." For after a very practical and effective style the colored citizen of the United States has graduated with respectable standing from a course of two hundred and fifty years in the university of the old-time type of manual labor. The South of to-day is what we see it, largely because the colored men and women at least during the past two hundred and fifty years, have not been lazy "cumberers of the ground," but the grand army of labor that has wrestled with mature and led these sixteen states "out of the woods" thus far on the high road to material prosperity.

But the new industrial education places the emphasis on the last word: Education. it teaches that all effective work done by the hand is first done by the soul. It is the man that works the hand, not the hand that works the man. No ordinary system of labor, however plodding, faithful and persistent, can develop the resources of the least American state, unless it is organized, supervised and directed by intelligence, character and trained executive ability.

The state of Massachusetts, more than two hundred and fifty years ago,"started business" on the bleak north-eastern Atlantic coast with two ideas:

1. That every man and woman should "work for a living." 2.That every boy and girl should be sent to school. The little state "fought it out on that line" for two hundred or more years before there was within its borders what we now call a school of industrial training. But during this time it had raised up a dozen generations of people of more than ordinary intelligence and habit of work as "steady-going" and persistent as the procession of the he seasons and days and hours and minutes of the revolving years. To-day the new Bay State is one of the richest in the world. The average wage-earning in the Commonwealth, including every man, woman and child is 73 cents a day,--nearly twice the amount of the average wage of the whole country; and the state earns $250,000,000 per year in excess of the average earning of that number of the American people. And, beside this, there is no especial lack of all that characterized our higher American civilization.

This does not mean that industrial education is useless. Massachusetts was the first state, twenty-five years ago, to move in the introduction of industrial drawing into every common school, and she challenges the republic to-day for the excellence of her school of skilled industry and the various useful ornamental arts. But her example does remind some of our education that a trained mind, a solid character, an intelligent purpose and a determined will behind the hand, are the creators of all the genuine progress in the 0012233material development of the republic.

The especial problem of industrial education in the South is: How shall the vast majority of its colored children and youth who cannot live in cities and can attend only the country district or village common school for a few months in the year and a few years in a lifetime be introduced to the wide field of intelligent and skilled labor in its different departments?

It is so evident that we are almost indignant that any man in his sober senses fail to see it, that unless within the coming twenty-five years the young men and women of this race do take up the mechanical and operative occupations, as they have not yet, they will be first invited and finally compelled to "take a back seat" in the ranks of the laboring and producing class.

I have no question that the South has in its colored population the material for one of the most valuable operative classes in the world; a source of boundless prosperity in the development now awaiting it. What is needed just now is a little less newspaper "thundering in the index" about the vast resources of the Southern country to attract a rush of undesirable immigration from abroad, and a good deal more work put in on the practical side of education to bring its own laboring people up to their native capacity as the enlightened and skilled working class which the South now demands.

The colored graduates of the one hundred and sixty schools of the secondary and higher education in the South, if fitly trained, can be sent forth as teachers to the open country and village schools, where the vast majority of the children are found, and in numerous ways can awaken a great interest in all that relates to improved farming, house-keeping, economical living, mechanical training and operative industry. And thus can they explode the most dangerous public fallacy that still holds captive multitudes of well-meaning but ill-informed people--that the education of the masses is only another name for laziness and "big head." They can inaugurate a movement in thousands of rural communities that will crowd the secondary schools with students, well prepared by a good English elementary training for that union of a thorough academical and industrial outfit which will come like a fertilizing flood upon the open country and lift the people above the stagnation and discouragement that now broods over entire regions of the South-land.

The time has come when the colored clergy of the South should be called to the aid of this greatest of needed revivals. The history of every denomination of Christian churches in America proclaims the fact that that, in exact proportion to the revival of popular intelligence, good schools, improved industry and moral reform in the affairs of this world, has been the growth of "pure and undefiled religion." The old-time Congregational and Presbyterian clergy of the eastern and middle states of the Union, whose church polity carried along, as upon a strong current, the establishment of schools for the whole people, were the prophets of the prosperity, power and beneficent influence of these churches in the republic. The great revival of interest in popular education in every American church, at present, is one of the most hopeful omens of the future and largely accounts for the fact that the American Christian church as a whole to-day gives to the world the most reasonable, truthful, moral and spiritual interpretation of the Christian religion ever given to any people in any land since the great Teacher lived and taught in Palestine.

And while all this is coming to pass, let every man and woman of the race who seeks the ultimate and highest good of our "nation within a nation" stand fast in his or her own place and watch and pray and work for that "good time coming," which always does come when zeal is married to wisdom and "righteousness and peace have kissed each other" in any great 0013224effort for the uplift of mankind. Let not the young men and women waste life in reckless and visionary efforts, or in the attempt to carry by assault the venerable fortress of prejudice and injustice that can only be reduced through a siege of starvation by the grand army of children and youth which is now organizing and drilling for a final campaign of education. Man at the best is slow and obstinate; and the barbarism which is the growth of ages of human ignorance, folly and sin will only yield the gradual but irresistible power of a growing enlightenment, a broader justice and a more profound and comprehensive love. Horace Mann used to say "the difficulty with me is that I am always in a hurry, while God is never in a hurry." Certainly, on the backward look, this people, least of all, has reason to rail against Providence; for never in the world before was a community so numerous, in three brief centuries, so tided over the period of transition from the depths of human abasement to the summit of human opportunity.

It will not be through any crisis of violence and tumult and conflict of races, classes and nationalities that the grand army of the American people, 75,000,000 strong, will attain to its complete organization and be marshalled on the field to confront the united ignorance, superstition, shiftlessness, vulgarity and vice of the world on some perhaps not far distant, eventful day to come. All that can be done at present, in the unity and patience of wisdom and love, to lift the masses of our people to a higher plane of intelligent and skilled industry, better home living, economy, solid prosperity and a wider and loftier view of the life, through the entire range of agencies included in that greatest of all words, Education, will hasten the day of deliverance from every private and public hindrance to the complete success of any class of the American people.

Through a whole week before the battle of Sedan, which closed the dismal era of the despotism of Napoleon III, the different armies of the German powers were silently and steadily marching, each by its own most available road, toward the concentration of the hosts for the decisive conflict. If the leaders and soldiers of any special division had become discouraged and demoralized and gone tramping off on its own account, it would have come to grief and there would have been no united Germany and no republican France to-day. Happily each division of that mighty army, in good faith, marched by others from above which it did not understand, "trusting in God and keeping its power dry." And when on the final morning, the fog lifted from above the doomed city, and the hills all around it were swarming with the combined soldiery of the coming German empire, all men understood that the beginning of a new era for Europe and mankind was at its dawn.

Even so, whenever I "can get into the quiet" of trust in God and hope for man, do I seem to hear the steady tramp of the gathering armies of the republic that is to be; each still a "nation within a nation," but all under orders from the Captain of Salvation up in the heavens; approaching that union of races which shall make the real American people the chosen of God for the leadership of mankind through centuries to come. My prayer to God is that through no "invincible ignorance" concerning the past, no frivolity, no madness of impatience or failure in the common ways of life, this "nation within a nation" may be diverted from its providential line of march and be found wandering through unknown regions to its own confusion and the postponing yet farther the final destiny of the land we love. For this republic is the land that has led this people forth out of the wilderness; and its starry flag is the banner under which we all my one day find ourselves looking upward together, hearing once more the last word of our great commander, "Let us have peace."