ADDRESS.

One of the most notable results of the Civil War of a generation ago was the revelation of the prodigious material resources of the Republic to the people of the United States and of every nation around the globe. In the year 1860, even the more intelligent inhabitants of the three great sections, the North, the South, and the then far West, were strangely ignorant of these different portions of their own country. Outside of a small class of scientific observers and the few real statesmen then in commanding positions in state and national affairs, the northern people knew less of the vast empire of the sixteen southern states and their adjacent territories than of the British Islands. Even more deficient was the popular acquaintance with the great commonwealths, then called the North by the people living below the Ohio and Potomac rivers. The old Northeast was only getting acquainted with the original new Northwest. And between the Mississippi valley and the Pacific coast was a vast and only half known realm, labelled on the school geographies, the Rocky Mountains and the Great American Desert, more extensive than the original thirteen states. At the close of the war the wilderness empire of Alaska, of boundless extent, as little known as the ancient fabled realm of the Indias, had been annexed by purchase to the United States. Any man whose memory runs back forty years may recall his own ignorance of the Union which was revealed to the world at the close of the Civil war in 1865.

The three million young men who, during the terrible four years of conflict, had tramped the country from “away down East” to the boundaries of Mexico, brought home such a new geography the United States as had never been constructed by any of the great publishing houses that supply the text books for the fifteen millions of young Americans at school. It was as if, at the close of a grand drama or opera, acted or sung before a mighty audience to the sound of the national anthem, a curtain at the rear of the stage had been slowly lifted upon a magnificent spectacle in which, as in prophecy, was displayed the great reward of all the trial and toils, the blood and sacrifice of the past; the future of the United States of America, where every American boy and girl was invited to go forth and make a new home. No wonder that these great armies, whose martial fame resounded through 0003 4the world, dissolved like a cloud parade in the heavens, and in their place, as by a word of command from on high, appeared the grand army of American workingmen re-enforced by a thronging multitude from over the sea, marching under orders from headquarters to dress and keep this garden of the Lord; “to put all things under its feet.”

From that day, the might movement of the American people for the material development of their country has already written a new chapter in the history of civilization. Never before in one generation was seen such an amazing concentration of all the energies of humanity upon the subjugation of the material creation. Scientific discovery and the inventive genius of the race have been taxed to their utmost to furnish the “implements of war and subjugation” of nature for the use of man. Never has there been such a union of the highest culture, character and executive energy of a people for the work of making a new country a fit place for the building of the world's modern republic. Today the United States of America is, by all odds, the richest nation in the world. And, despite the dismal prognostications of the social, religious and political pessimist, this goodly land of ours, like a bewildering vision, still lies before every American youth, inviting to go forth and build therein a home fit for a sovereign citizen of the United States.

But the “saving common sense” of the American people has long since discovered the reason why, to several millions of free American citizens, this rational expectation is still but a dream. It is because of that radical national peril whose dictionary name is illiteracy. Illiteracy is a condition, compounded of the ignorance, superstition, shiftlessness, vulgarity and vice of several millions of our people; the slough of despond at the bottom of the most favored neighborhood; the pestilential everglade in more than one of the fairest of our American commonwealths. With a country as large as all Europe and such a variety of natural resources as is nowhere found in any nation upon earth, we have only twice the number of people now crowded into the narrow limits of the British Islands to face the appalling campaign of labor for which we are enlisted. Even were all our people, each in his own place, a “workman that needeth not to be ashamed;“ intelligent enough to work in connection with that tremendous agency of labor-saving machinery which exalts man to a “co-worker with God;“ the force would be all too small for the enterprise. But when we see how millions of our American working men and women are still too ignorant to do more than 0004 5one little stroke of work, and that not well; how the temporary decline of any branch of industry wrecks a host of workmen on thebarren shore of absolute poverty; how difficult it is to enlighten the dim intelligence of the ignorant and how much more difficult to make the self-appointed leaders of this army of incapables recognize the actual causes of the poverty and destitution they propose to overcome: we can understand the present crisis known as the Labor Question. And while they air is still full of loud and angry voices proposing this or that sweeping and radical remedy for the nation's ills, it will be well for us if we understand that the “weight of the meeting,” the wise and thoughtful public opinion that must finally become the platform of every reform; is found in the movement known by the familiar name; Industrial Education.

This movement, Industrial Education, is the most notable of all the successive reforms in popular education during the past fifty years. It means that this republic now calls on every American boy and girl, the twenty millions of young Americans who twenty-five years from today must be the solid phalanx at the center of the great fluctuating multitude of the American people, to put on the a'mor for the “grand and awful time “ahead. The republic now summons the superior class of the schools for colored youth to the work of lifting the fifty per cent of the eight millions of American citizens of African descent out of the slough of illiteracy which is the bottom curse of every southern American state and the chief obstacle to their progress in the career of American citizenship.

It is an almost hopeless task to attempt to improve the present condition of labor even in the Northern states, while a great multitude of ignorant and incompetent working men from over the sea is now enlisted in a campaign for a war of labor against capital, largely under the command of foreign demagegues and political adventurers, driving every northern state to the perilous edge of civil war.

The best mind and heart and practical wisdom of the entire country has come to the conclusion that our only relief from this peril to American civilization is to be found in the movement known as Industrial Education. This means the uplift of the entire ground floor of American society the laboring class of the country, to a condition of intelligent, moral and executive manhood and womanhood where it may become, in fact as in name, a generation worthy of the republic. Then, under fit industrial leadership, the great war against poverty will go on to its finish. Only thus 0005 6shall we avoid the dangers that threaten our beautiful and bountiful land which offers a place for every worthy American boy and girl fit for the residence of a sovereign citizen of the United States.

I speak to day to you, young men and women of North Carolina, for whom your great state has established this school of Industrial Education, on this theme; “The American Workingman of the New Time.” I would try to show you what the wisest people of every state and of the nation are trying to do for you through the generous expenditure of money by the nation and the commonwealth for the training of the hand in connection with the head and the heart, for a true American manhood and womanhood. I warn you to give no heed to the class of misinformed and over-excited leaders of your own race, or the back-number educators of any race, who are crying aloud that this new interest in Industrial Education for the uplift of your people is only a new device for your humiliation and permanent subjection to an American peasant class, which is only another name for the virtual re-establishment of the slave system of a generation ago. I know, of course, that every state in this Union has its due supply of men and women, stupid enough to honestly believe such a thing possible as the permanent shunting of any class or race of the American people off upon a side-track of the great central highway of American civilization. But I do not believe that you, young men and women, for whom this grand old commonwealth has already done so much and so well, will be shaken in your faith in the permanent good will and wisdom of the American people in your behalf.

This movement for Industrial Education is nothing less than a new inspiration of the best heart and head and wisdom of the whole country towards the final emancipation of the American workmen of every sort and condition, from the old-time degradation of ignorance and inefficient toil, which for ages past has held the masses of mankind in bondage to the material wants of a half animal life; has branded labor with the stamp of social and political inferiority; has exalted luxurious idleness and a selfish culture to the honors of permanent superiority; and degraded religion itself to a sort of hospital service to bind up the wounds of humanity and reconcile men to their brief residence in this “vale of tears,” a great prison house of oppression, by the hope of a visionary happiness in a world beyond the grave.

This movement for the training of a new generation of the American workingmen and women of this new time is a logical 0006 7and vital outcome of the American idea of Universal Education. Universal Educational, in its new American sense, means the determination of the American people to help every American child to know something, to do something, and to be somebody.

It means first, the training of all Americans in the practical Christian religion and morality which, without distinction of sect or creed or church, is recognized through Christendom as “the common Christianity”. It means, second, the proper training and informing of the mind of every American child and youth to the extent that his intellect shall become a reliable instrument for acquiring information and forming correct judgment, as a good citizen, always a student in the great University of American life. Third, it means the training of the executive, the doing power, of every American child, so that he may obey the divine command; “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do that do with thy might;“ the might of the physical strength; the might of the intellect; the might of the conscience; so that the whole man, the complete woman, shall be put into each and every stroke of the hand, that our work may be the barometer by which to measure the altitude of our national manhood and womanhood, and that “whether we eat or drink or whatsoever we do, all shall be done to the glory of God.”

This is the national American idea of Universal Education, and whoever says it is not, publishes his own ignorance of the Nations history and life. As long as any portion of the American people in any state or neighborhood is in a condition of illiteracy ignorant, superstitious, shiftless, vulgar and vicious; for it the very name of democracy is a ghastly satire. Republican society and government can become a reality only in proportion as the entire body politic is educated to that condition in which “a government of the people, for the people, by the people” is a fact. And while any considerable class in any American community, by reason of illiteracy remains incompetent for its supreme function of Sovereign citizenship, the government of that community is a practical monarchy, oligarchy or aristocracy. And since any government is good according to its genuineness, the worst government on earth is a nominal republic ruled by all the political arts and devices that constitute the most disreputable and dangerous features of the despotisms of the old time.

It is not contended that all or even a majority of the citizens of a republic like ours, can be educated to competent leadership in any department or society. But it has been demonstrated that the overwhelming majority of any American community can be lifted by the education of the heart, the head and the 0007 8hand, to condition where they will be competent to choose suitable leaders in every department of human life, and to decide whether their leadership is a success. So far in the highest realm of public life, the election of the chief executive of the nation, the President of the United States, the American people has no especial need to be ashamed of its doings in comparison with the working of the great European methods of providing nations with their supreme rulers. We can throw open all the doors and windows from attic to cellar of our modest old White House at Washington during the past hundred years of American history, and from George Washington to Wm. McKinley invite comparison in the character, the ability, the manhood and womanhood of our presidents and their families, with the corresponding class of Kings and Emperors of any or every nation in Christendom. Universal Education is the great national dynamo by which the vast and complicated machinery of American republican society is kept in motion. It is the big national “lift,” placed under the “mud sills” of American society, “never hasting,” “never resting,” “growing while men sleep,” mightiest of all forces in peace and war, like the awful going on of nature, ever lifting the ground-floor of American society nearer the light and glory of a Christian civilization.

The notion of any present improvement in the condition of the American workingman of to-day, especially as he is found among the 8,000,000 of the freedom of 1865, in the sixteen states of the South, without an uplift from the foundations through the agency of Universal Education, is a mischievous delusion. The “burning question” today is not, how fifty per cent of its entire body above ten years of age; one-third the population of all these states; came into this condition of illiteracy, or who is more justly responsible for its continuation. The question of to-day is:—how shall these people be lifted out of it? The cause of the existence of the paralysis that still, like a benumbing fate, broods over entire regions of this fair Southland, is the lack of general intelligence and mental training; of moral reliability in the fundamental relations of civilized life, and of the skill in every department of labor; which still prevents the large majority of these people from aspiring to anything essentially better than their present state, and makes them unable to avail themselves of their present opportunities to work in the superior methods now required; the lack of the honesty, energy and patience essential to success anywhere; the lack of that pratical-sense which lifts them above the childish habit of spending money on childish things instead of saving on the lower to invest on 0008 9the higher side of life. To expect that any people whatsoever can be lifted above such a condition of poverty, shiftlessness and general inefficiency by any brilliant stroke of statemansship, or any clever device of calling old things by new names, is simply to invoke the impossible. And to expect that eight million American citizens of any race or class can perpetually be held in this condition with safety to the states where they live or to the nation of which they are a vital part, is the wildest conceit of the most visionary political adventurer.

The nation, the state, the neighborhood can await patiently for the slow-moving agency of Universal Education to do its proper work; can begin with occasional reactions and survive many disastrous revulsions of public opinion; as long as its face is turned toward the rising sun and the grand good work of educating the children really goes on. But to turn the back on all this and fall behind upon any scheme of new or old “fooling” with young America is simply a waste of human effort at the peril of the wreck of national life. The mournful spectacle of one of the greatest empires and most gifted peoples in history, in five hundred years reduced to a defunct kingdom, sixty eight per cent, of its people unable to read, battling with reckless disregard for its last group of colonial possessions which it is unable to govern, calling aloud in its agony to the nation for aid while inviting anarchy at home, an object lesson to be studied by every man who deserves the lofty position of American citizenship, may well awaken us to the fact that only through Universal Education can even this mighty American republic or any class of its citizens be held up to its present estate. “Educate the children,” said Thomas Jefferson. “Then the coming generation will be wiser than we, and many things impossible to us will be say to them.” It was this conviction that impelled the superior people of these sixteen southern states, thirty years ago, the great movement for the enlisting of their whole people into a grand of industry through the establishment of the American system of the Universal Education of all classes and races in every state. The world has never witnessed such a spectacle as this inspiration of the superior Southern people at the close of the civil war to set up, as the supreme motive power in the future life of their states, the entire system, of education developed by the genius of the American people during the past two hundred and fifty years of their colonial and national existence.

It was not from any sentimental or merely literary interest in good learning; from no laudable desire to imitate other nations, 0009 10or to become the rival of other states; or through compulsion from without; that these sixteen southern commonwealths in rapid succession established the people's common school all the way up from the plantation primary to the State University for both races and all classes; and have stood by it through these troubled thirty-five years, from the almost absolute financial prostration of 1865 to the more hopeful industrial promise of 1898. It has been from the profound conviction that, without this fundamental work among the less-favored class, it would be absurd to expect the development of that intelligent and skilled industry which could master the magnificent heritage committed to the charge of their twenty millions of people. And while the nation and other states and good friends from abroad have co-operated in this great enterprise, the heaviest burden has been honestly and bravely shouldered at home. It has been understood that no people can be permanently educated except by itself. The $500,000,000 expended for the schooling of the four million of southern children and youth during the last thirty years laid the broad foundation of the future power and glory of these commonwealths in years to come. It only needs that the friends of the new people's school shall hold out; that the demands of every new year with its increasing number of school children and the heavier burden of the support of a continually improving system of Universal Education be cheerfully and wisely met; to realize the fulfillment of any rational prophecy of the future.

And it is a reason for hope, even for great expectation, that this movement of Universal Education has been so largely on the lines of the reform methods of organizing, governing and instructing the schools of every description. It would have been as impossible to educate the four millions of southern children and youth by the old time methods of school keeping, as to plant and gather the crops of North Carolina, this year, after the style of the grandfathers. I have just returned from a tour of visitation among the normal schools and the teachers of eight southern states. The most prominent feature of the situation is the steady improvement of the teaching force in all classes of southern schools. Everywhere I find these faithful men and devoted women who constitute the superior class of the profession straining every point to become more worthy of their high calling; often spending their vacation months in laborious studies; investing their hard earned money for self improvement; working as never before to awaken every class of men and women to the conviction that the supreme interest of the hour is the uplift 0010 11of these states by the improved instruction and training of their youth.

Now the foremost duty of the colored American citizen in every southern commonwealth is to see that his side of this great seedfield is not neglected in the furnishing of this great American chance to the children and youth. The one thing to teach in the schools and the churches is the true meaning of the heritage of free labor which came to the race as the chief bequest of the great civil war. Without the true understanding and use of this supreme opportunity by every young man and woman, even freedom itself will be a useless and empty gift and the precious gift of complete American citizenship a delusion and a snare.

The worst blight that can fall on your children is the old-world and old-time pagan notion that labor is a curse of God; that common work is a hardship, and even if a duty, something to be gotten rid of; that the higher education is a short cut out of it; and the ideal condition is a life of cultivated laziness. The price of all enduring success is intelligent and persistent labor. Without it no people ever came to anything great or good. The grandest nations have risen to their greatness and glory by the tremendous energy and patient toil of their people through long centuries. Every structure of culture and mental superiority is built on the solid foundation of an intelligent and progressive people. Education is the way of learning to do better work, in shorter time, by more effective methods; so that the working man in every realm of effort can have more leisure for the upper side of life, to build the home, the school, the church, society, the state after the style of a Christian civilization. Every class of the American people will be exalted to a higher position in proportion as it has learned through education to do its work better, more rapidly, more honestly; to put the brain, the conscience, the entire manhood and womanhood into the very finger ends of its two hands.

No people in history has been more favored by providence than the eight millions of colored citizens in the southern states. In less than three hundred years from a race of pagan savages and slaves at home, it has been lifted upward to its present lofty position of complete American sovereign citizenship. No people in Christendom has achieved a progress so substantial in a time so short. Now the question is; will you, will your people under your leadership, hearken to the loud call to a higher manhood and womanhood which will fit you to understand and use the good providence that “thus far has led you on?”

0011 12

The first step in this experiment for the Industrial Education for the eight million of our colored American citizens is the improvement of the people's common schools. The time has come when the colored people of these states are summoned to put their own shoulders to the wheel and see that their children are given the opportunity of good elementary schooling for at least six months in the year, by teachers competent in learning, reliable in character, fit to be not only the guides of the children but the helpers of the people who make up their constituency. I am aware of the numerous difficulties that beset the common people in the vast open country, where the majority of the most destitute population are living. But the time has come to say, that when neither increasing aid can be expected from friends abroad, nor from immediate friendly legislation at home, this people holds in its hands, at least in moderate measure, the means to do this work themselves.

I have spent the last eighteen years largely in annual journeyings through every southern state, and in some ways know them all as well as my own state, Massachusetts. I have kept my eye on this great enterprise of educating the two and one-half millions of colored school children, which began at the opening and was adopted by the South after the close of the civil war. I have no question that the colored people of these states, with the exception of occasional communities, are able, at least to make an effort to lift their schools in the open country where the greatest need exists, up to a term of six months of the year, taught by competent and morally reliable instructors, and to make the common school the mission centre of the best life of every community.

Of course this means that the colored people shall learn to do what every American community which has built up a valuable system of public instruction has done; give their mind and heart to its success; save their money from useless and childish expenditure for personal gratification to put into it; insist that their teachers shall be men and women of suitable intelligence, natural ability and character to make it a real and not a sham school; and “stick to it” until the better times when the legislative chairs can be filled with men who realize the peril of illiteracy and enact laws that will enable the people to help themselves for its cure.

I recently visited an important village in one of the educational centers of a Southern state in which there were two great schools for white pupils, largely supported by the aid of the commonwealth and local taxation. The one large school for 0012 13the colored children and youth was under the management of a young man of superior education, the graduate of a well-known collegiate seminary, assisted by a group of intelligent young women. The building itself, the gift of some benevolent association, was perhaps adequate to the needs of the district. But the principal was hard at work to persuade the colored people to reseat the school rooms in a comfortable and wholesome manner; he appeared to think with no very great assurance of success. Meanwhile a few dozen of the leading men of the community had built a secret society hall, probably at a larger cost than the school-house, and the Sunday afternoon I spent in town was given a grand parade of the order with a religious service in the largest church in the place. The expense of this public demonstration would have probably reseated the school house, and the money spent by these fifty men for their own personal enjoyment and edification, in a few years would have put the colored common schools of that town in a good condition to offer certainly a good elementary education to all and perhaps a superior grade for the few who would really be benefited by receiving it.

Now this case is one of numbers of the same character that I am constantly observing and it emphasizes the point I make. It is just as applicable to the white as the colored people, but more important to the colored because of their comparatively small means of contributing for the improvement of their own schools. If the more favored class of these eight millions of colored citizens indulge themselves in what, under other circumstances might be at least the harmless luxuries of civilization, at the expense of the continued illiteracy of fifty per cent. of their own people; and if their clergy too often permit themselves to be carried away by this display of self indulgent superiority; and if the people's common school at the base of society is left to starve in a shabby school-house, too often under incompetent and sometimes immoral teachers, and the ablest young people, educated by student aid from the churches and Sunday schools of the North, so often are unwilling to go down to the people to advise and labor for the improvement of the common means of instruction, but attempt to establish little select schools for the few who can pay tuition, really depending on a yearly contribution from abroad for their permanent support; then the present unsatisfactory condition of affairs will continue.

Horace Mann used to say that almost every distinguished public man in New England, fifty years ago, from Daniel Webster 0013 14down, at the beginning of his career had been a teacher. Daniel Webster himself said— “If I had as many boys as old king Priam, I would send them all to a country district school.” In this way the entire class of public men of every profession, with some expectations in the clergy, came forward, sixty years ago, at the beginning of the great educational revival led by Horace Mann, Henry Barnard and other noted educators, to their support.

The educational public of the eight millions of our colored American people may well take this example to heart. The first duty of the hour for every young man and woman who has been able by assistance received from friends at home or abroad, to be qualified for any position of influence among his own people, is not to turn his back on home, however great its discouragements, but to go back and give what money never can bestow, himself, wherever he can do the most good, and especially where he can persuade the mass in every community to rise above that habit of dependence which is the most hopeless form of slavery, and learn the great lesson of giving and doing its uttermost for the training of their children. Thus may they hope to meet the responsibilities and burdens which will certainly increase with the years, as they come to realize the tremendous meaning of the American sovereign citizenship, purchased for them at the cost of the earnings of a whole generation, the blood of five hundred thousand of the bravest and best American young men, and the unnameable sufferings and sacrifices of millions of others, crowned by the martyrdom of the great President whose name will stand in history with Washington as the father of his people.

The scripture just now for the more favored youth of this race to study is the tenth chapter of the gospel according to St. Matthew. Every word of that solemn charge given by the Master to the first twelve disciples should be engraven on the heart of every young man and women who, by the providence of God and the labors and gifts of devoted men and woman, has been lifted above the mass of his fellows. “Freely ye have received, Freely give.”

During the past thirty years the nation by its generous approporiation of public lands and monies, and the benevolent people of the North and the South by their contributions of perhaps fifty-million of dollars, with the later action of all the states of the South, have built up a valuable group of institutions for the superior education of colored youth. Every one of these, whatever may be the theory of its managers concerning higher 0014 15education; is now called upon by the united voice of the American people to support a department of some kind for the training at least of the class of its students who are preparing for the work of instruction, in the elements of Industrial Education. Indeed, to-day, the provision for this sort of teaching and training is perhaps more largely offered to the colored than the white youth of the South. The states of the south should respond to this call and show their appreciation of these beneficient donations by refusing to give a certificate as a common school teacher to any graduate from these great schools who has not taken a course in some department of industrial education, either man or woman. The time has come when a considerable class of students who frequent these great schools, largely supported by student aid, but refusing to qualify themselves for the most important work demanded for the southern colored people and contemptuous of the suggestion that they are expected to work for their own race, should be notified that here after their leading study should be the art of “paddling their own canoe.”

The point where this bottom necessity of the colored race, the uplift of the working man and woman by the lever of Industrial Education joins itself to the people, is the teacher in the country district and village school. These teachers have now the greatest opportunity for valuable service to their own people in their own states and the nation of any body of youth in the republic. They are called to wake the eight millions of their race, a nation within a nation, twice as large as the entire population of the United States under the presidency of Washington, to the imperative necessity of building up their own common school in every way possible. And especially should they warn them to ground their children in a radical respect for labor, a willingness to be instructed in the improved methods of work, and a determination to strike out for success in life in the true American way by self support, honorable independence, and a style of living worthy an American citizen. No class of people, not even the clergy, have this opportunity as missionaries of the higher Christian civilization to this constituency. For this constituency is their whole people, all the parents, all the children of both sexes, in every school district in sixteen great commonwealths. It only needs that these teachers should be inspired with the idea of the industrial, social and public influence of this constituency to predict any degree of success.

Although it is not possible to make a country district or village school a proper industrial seminary in the technical sense 0015 16yet much is practicable, if the teachers are measureably qualified for the work and believe with the heart in its importance.

Such a teacher, man or woman, has the great advantage of appearing in the country as the representative both of the state and a good education. And with the personal ability and worth that any competent teacher should possess this position can be sustained. By teaching according to the natural methods of instruction, he will lay the foundation of Industrial Education, as every child in this way will be trained to use all his faculties in becoming a self-dependent investigator for knowledge. By the organization and government of his school, he can aid his little ones to become a self-controled and self-governed body of prospective sovereign citizens of their public. By teaching them how to live and work together he lays the foundations of co-operation in the home, industrial and civil life. And all the time he can make his school more than an “Arabian Knights entertainment” by telling true stories of the noblest Americans who have risen by their own efforts to the highest estate. He can show that the nation has been and always will be govern by its true workingmen; the working men who do not spend their time in abusing the rich, powerful and educated class, but in becoming what the best sort of good men and women should be. The well-told story of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Greely, James A. Garfield, Fredrick Douglas, and of multitudes of the same sort, will make any lazy boy ashamed and awaken the most trifling girl from her little conceit of selfishness. He can organize his own school into a committee of the whole on the state of the school house in every boy and girl shall have something to do in making it a convenient and pleasant home for their summer and winter residence. Instead of a gang of destroyers, wrecking the building, whittling the benches to pieces, defacing the walls and outhouses by vulgar and obscene demonstrations, he will educate his school into a group of creators, every child in its own best way co-operation to dress and keep this little garden of knowledge entrusted to their care.

If a young woman, the teacher will not become the servant or slave of a crowd of impudent and exacting children. She will teach them to render her proper respect as the representative of the state and relieve her of all the duties of the school room that interfere with her proper work. She can interest the child in nature study, and thus not only give a knowledge of the world in which it lives, but also develop a mental habit of acquiring 0016 17knowledge by which all that is known may be assimilated and become a positive addition to mental power.

She will find it the most attractive study to train her little community into the art of using their hands in the manufacture of a variety of things convenient and beautiful for home and school-room use. All the simple apparatus necessary for the illustration of elementary nature-study can be made by the school children under her direction. She will encourage the children to consider their parents and give them all the aid possible in their hours out of school and instruct the pupils in a variety of ways by which they can improve the state of affairs in their own homes, especially by taking the care of little children. If a group of them are detained at a noon recess in the school house, she can utilize her knowledge of good housekeeping and set a dinner table that will bring a guest every day to share the noonday meal.

In this way the teachers can wake up all the superior industrial skill and spirit of a community to the aid of her own work. The mechanic, the gardener, the storekeeper, the clever man of all work, will be only too glad to come in and help in any line where she is no expert. In this way she will do the best thing possible; make the district schoolhouse the center of the better life of the district. She will bring the people together for occasional conferences on important matters of living; utilize the best women to aid the young people; bring the more experienced help, and made the entire school the agency of a Christian civilization.

There will be little difficulty in persuading the people of such district, to extend the school-term by the personal contribution of each to keep such a friend of the children with them as long as lougas possible; to improve the school house, and to make in their own district a model school. A village or a country once embarked on this experiment of self-help will have little difficulty in finding friends elsewhere who will gladly give fifty dollars to obtain an extra twomonths school for twenty children rather than give it to one boy or girl to study away from home in a college There may be a boy in the school or the district who displays talent for excellence in some line of work or study, or a girl who could succeed in one of the hundred and fifty ways by which an young American woman can earn a support. The teacher will find a way of soliciting the means to do what such a student can not do for himself, without creating that sense of dependence which is the death of all genuine manhood.

Why should not these teachers, so many of whom educated by the country or the state and often by the charity of friends 0017 18from abroad, in their turn give back to their own people what they have thus received? The colored youth in these schools should understand that the churches and Sunday schools and benevolent people of the North do not give them the means of schooling to enable them to start in a profession, or use their education exclusively for their own culture; but that they may go down to their own people and give themselves to the noble and exalting work of leading them up from the terrible illiteracy and degradation in which they now abide. It may be a good thing in a special case to establish a new private, even denominational school and, in case of extreme need, obtain aid from abroad. But it is a very bad habit for the graduates of these schools to fall into. Their place is with the people in their own common schools, to build them up by home effort and to be to the whole community a representative of the American idea of self-help.

Here is the open door to the inauguration of the beneficient movement of Industrial Education among the people who need it most. It is the only practical way. The school of higher grade for colored youth that ignores it is an obstacle to the most vital interest of the people. The way to raise great trees, massive live oaks, superb elms, lofty pines, is not to concentrate the fertility of a whole plantation on one garden plot, surrounded by a wilderness, but to cultivate the entire farm to a point where all good and beautiful products appear each in its place. Such a people as the eight millions of the American colored race can be made by a generation of effort like this I have described and can be trusted to produce its own superior class in every department of life; the men and women who rise from the ranks to every grade of superiority. So was the great teacher born in a manager, a carpenter's son, a model youth in far off Palestine raised up by God not only as the Saviour of souls, but the leader of the higher civilization of the world.

It is high time that the colored people through the entire Southland awake from the delusion that this movement for Industrial Education is only the fad of a few visionary educators or a way for supplying the country with mechanies and operatives and teaching girls to sew and cook. All this is included. But the American people have in mind an end far broader and results more comprehensive than this. This movement is nothing less than an effort by the upper side of American society to lift up the lower estate of humanity in every race and condition. It does it, first, by a reform in general education that will stir the mind, awaken the moral sense and stimulate the executive ability of the masses. In this way it works reform in all the methods of 0018 19labor which will elevate our common life everywhere above a menial condition and, at once, make the every-day work of the world honorable by making it the expression of all the higher feelings of our human nature.

The American people mean by this movement of Industrial Education three things, equally essential to civilization, and all characterized by radical and far-reaching improvements in the life of mankind.

First, the American people mean by Industrial Education that the masses of American children and youth shall be educated into intelligent working men and women in every department of industry, while the superior minds shall be given the advanced training which will fit them for leadership of the grand army of labor.

While there should be no unreasonable resistance to the higher education of the colored youth who are its proper subjects, the imperative duty of the hour is to concentrate all the forces of school, church and home on the rescue of the vast multitude of this people from its deplorable condition of mental, moral and industrial destitution.

No sensible educator believes that the masses of any people can be trained to industrial leadership. But it is possible, by a system of Universal Education, combined with industrial training, to bring the majority of any people up to a state where they not only can do one thing with success, but have also the power to diversify their work. Thus only can they be relieved from the pitiable condition of several millions of our working folks, who can do but one little thing and that without skill, while the decline of that industry throws them helpless upon public or private charity.

The great success which has attended the industrial development of our country during the past thirty years has been largely owing to the superior general intelligence of the majority of the American people, whether of native or European descent. The civil war was in itself a mighty school, which, in 1865, graduated three million young men, each in his own way a “man of all work,” with a mind made up to enlist for the good fight in which the prize would be his own success in obtaining an honorable position in life. And what a marvelous development of varied and versatile industry has come forth during the past generation from that grand army of soldiers of all work.

Indeed, this remarkable spectacle of the power of the intelligent American workingman to adjust himself to new emergencies 0019 20alway been one of the most powerful elements in the development of the country.

Thirty-six years ago I left the city of Albany, New York, which, up to that day, remained one of the most aristocratic and industrially unprogressive of our American state capitals. At that date its face was set against any considerable development of manufacturing industry which would mar the glory of its political and social distinction. On the opposite shore, five miles above on the Hudson river, had come up the rival city of Troy: largely built by this manufacturing interest represented by people from northern New York and New England, as a sort of protest to its high-stepping neighbor across the way. Its leading industry then was in iron, and it was largely occupied in making the iron stoves in which the people of the Northwest were burning up their forest to warm their houses.

About the year 1862 it was demonstrated that the western brethren could make their own stoves to better advantage than the Trojan manufacturers, and they began to transfer their capital, retire from the business and sometimes to “fail”. Then a great fire broke out and burned a huge black hole in the business section of the city: whereupon their neighbors under the shadow of the capital nodded their heads to each other and said; “we told you so.”

But after some ten years I made a return visit to the two cities. I found Troy a city of fifty thousand people, absolutely humming with a new industry. It had invented the Troy laundry, and every young gentleman of the “smart set” in Boston and New York was “expressing” his linen to Troy to be washed and iron by steam. To day you can not walk many blocks in any American city without coming face to face with the huge sign, “Troy steam Laundry.” Out of that had grown up a great interest in making the articles to be washed and ironed. So when the Wilson Tariff bill, a few years since, went up to the Senate of the United States; the nearest approach to the Free Trade idea in the past half century; it met Democratic Senator Murphy of Troy saying: “The cuffs and collars of Troy now make the 'condition' and your Tariff bill is only the “theory”. So the “theory” gave way to the cuffs and collars of Troy; whereupon the President of the United States refused, in strong language, to sign the new bill, which became a law over his head. An intelligent workingman or woman who can turn a hand to a new industry when an old industry fails is the one fixed “condition” of success in every American community.

Here also is the relief for what some of our economists declare 0020 21the peril of labor-saving machinery. They claim it changes the old-time American man of-all-work to a stolid operative; a mere annex to one function of a labor-saving machine. But, on the other hand, labor-saving machinery opens the eyes of the workingman to a new condition of industrial affairs and tempts him to wake up. An ignorant workman can be trained to such a fate, or a generation of poor women or little children can for a time be used to wear out their lives as an appendage to a spindle. But the intelligent workman meets the power of nature half way. He studies his machine while he works, meditating on some way of improving it, harnessing his brain to his hand and his machine to make even more effective. Many of the most important improvements in labor-saving machinery are made by people who began life as operatives or workmen. The mechanics of the Springfield Armory save the Union by giving to the army the new Springfield musket. The railroad system of the republic has been largely developed by the engineers, conductors, firemen and workmen in its sooty an and noisy shops all over the Union. The real superiority in any center of American industry is the general intelligence and character of its operative and working class, which can turn its hand to learn and do a new and better thing as fast as the old thing passes away. It was good advice of the great tent-maker, Paul the apostle; “Put off the old man,” with all his ignorance and barbarism and childishness “and put on the new man, day by day.”

I was standing, one hot afternoon, thirty years ago, under the awning in front of a drug store in the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. The proprietor, a good specimen of the average Englishman of his day, called my attention to fifty Irishmen who were sweeping the street opposite the store, in the slow, stolid way in which that work would be done by that sort of people in the years before our great national flood. My friend broke out: “The city is sending the children of these men to school at the public expense. When they come out, will one of them ever be willing to sweep this street, like his father? Where shall we find the people to do this common work of life when we have educated all the children above the sphere into which they were born and they learned to despise the way in which things were done by their fathers and mothers?”

“Well, my friend,” I replied,” these fifty men probably represent a community of two hundred people, of whom at least one hundred are children. If left to the illiteracy of their fathers and mothers, in two or three generations they will lay 0021 22the foundation of a new “slum;“ a great city ward crowded with people standing in each others way, a perpetual drain upon your poor-house, your jail, lunatic asylum, and your charity, the despair of all good people. Half a century of that thing would build up in the lower region of every metropolitan city in the republic a new darkest London, Paris, Rome with the difference that here every man of them would hold a vote that in some crisis of the country would arm him with a power greater than is wielded by any sovereign in Europe, the power to change the succession in the chief executive branch of the national government. And 'no political party can keep itself even passibly honest with such a temptation as a community like this always becomes, even to the most scrupulous and patriotic statesman.'

“Now this city educates these one hundred children to get them out of 'the sphere of life' into which a thousand years of old world despotism has landed their parents, and to lift them up in range of all the opportunities that the great state of Ohio offers to every intelligent, virtuous, industrious and economical citizen of the commonwealth and the nation. Among these one hundred graduates from the schools, probably one ingenious young fellow will invent a machine which, with a pair of mules and, at most two men, will sweep this street from curbstone to curbstone as clean as your parlor floor. The ninety-eight young men and women that are left will probably take up half as many different trades and professions and each, besides his own calling, will have a lively interest in the upper side of society. Beside the regulation minister, doctor, lawyer, member of Congress, etc., you will have two or three intelligent farmers or educated gardeners, a dozen mechanies of different sorts, a skilled engineer, an architect, a dozen promising merchants clerks, possibly a boy at West Point and Annapolis Several of the girls will become teachers in your schools, skilled workwomen, intelligent and womanly mothers of families; wherever they are, helpers in the churches, the charities and the various associations for the mental, moral and industrial uplift of people like their own parents.”

“This sort of young people don't hang about your city 'waiting for something to turn up, but strike out in the American way, each to find his or her own place in life. I could name hundreds of them that have already become known and valued in the communities to which they have gone. And it is just in this way that our American cities and large towns are becoming our most valuable universities; dipping down into their lower elements all the time to rescue these children from the life that would otherwise be a prolonged curse; giving them the intelligence and the 0022 23industrial training that arms them for the battle of life, and sending them forth, not like 'sheep without a shepherd,' but each his own guide to seek out the place where he can best serve himself and build up a Christian civilization.”

Ten years later I passed again the old drug store. My friend was no longer there. But as I lingered a moment, down came the very machine I told him of, invented by a young colored graduate of the High school, with one man and one horse sweeping the street from curb to curb. And in the thirty years since I left the Queen city, and in all my travels through thirty states of the union, I have never been out of sight of some Buckeye boy or girl, trained in the schools of that great commonwealth, the new mother of Presidents, each “claiming the earth” and getting as much of it as the education of a great American state had qualified him or her to reasonably expect.

The only peril of the South from its eight millions of colored citizens is the peril of a continued illiteracy that will hold multitudes of ignorant, incompetent, vicious and helpless people in its bonds, with the prospect of becoming a permanent class; an intolerable drain upon the population of these commonwealths; the “terrible temptation” of the political demagogue and the fanatical religionists, and by and by the prey of every enemy of the human race. It is no weak sentiment, no delusion of an optimistic social science, but the highest educational statesmanship that today summons the best brain and heart, the finest culture and the soundest wisdom, the church, the humanity of these states to the supreme task of Industrial Education. One generation of vigorous and wise administration of this policy will demonstrate that in its colored citizenship every southern state has now a mine of wealth, in its capacity for an enlightened agricultural, operative and mechanical class, to which its boasted superiority in climate, soil, mineral deposits, forests and water-power is secondary. The valley of the Amazon in South America, in natural resources, in one of the most favored regions upon the earth, but more than one country in North Carolina is now of more consequence to the civilized world than it all. No country or people is great and powerful until it is grounded firmly on an intelligent, honest and economical system of labor, including all the common industries by which a nation, through, every generation, becomes more prosperous at home and is better furnished to adapt itself to the various changes and improvements in the industries of the civilized world.

In the second place, the American people mean by this movement for industrial education a general uplift in the quality 0023 24of work and in the character of the working people, as displayed in their occupation; the marriage of the conscience and character with the working hand.

The most mischievous misapprehension concerning the people of the United States, as represented by its pessimistic critics abroad and at home, is the wide spread idea that we are a mercenary people, a nation of traders if not sharpers; that the rage for the accumulation and the selfish and vulgar use of wealth is the most conspucious feature in the national character; and that, generally, the higher side of life is persistently ignored in a lower view of existence. Of course we expect this judgment from that portion of our foreign critics who hold to the divine right and of kings, the infallibility of the church and the supreme right and obligation of a hereditary aristocracy to dominate in human affairs. Our existence as a nation is a standing challenge to every nation founded on this idea of human nature and civilization. And we must not be surprised that the class of the American people who hold to substantially the same view of society and government; a class more numerous and influential than many of us suppose; will have a poor opinion of everybody and everything in their own country in proportion as it is not moved by a crank turned in their own consecrated hands. If there is one thing demonstrated by he teaching of history it is the obstinate incapacity of any man or women, of any class, however cultivated and estimable in its own way, to understand the capacity or do justice to the character and achievements of any class below itself; especially when the existence and influence of it own personality or its own order is involved in the perpetuation of the present state of affairs. In a conversation with President Grant in the White-house on national aid to education, he quietly remarked that “in his opinion there was a great deal too much reading and writing now to suit a considerable portion of the members of congress up in the capitol.”

But it does not require a very extended knowledge of private and public life to correct the mistake of the entire class of critics, reformers and public aspirants for office who trade on this assumption concerning the American people. The case was well put to me by one of the most distinguished members of the late “Pam-American Congress,” a convention called to Washington at the suggestion of Mr. Blaine, then Secretary of State, composed of leading diplomats, statesmen and educators, of the Central and South American Republics, for consultation on matters concerning their mutual interest and co-operation in the larger administration of government on the western continent. 0024 25At the close of the session the members of the conversation visited different portions of the country and came to the city of Boston, where, with our usual habit of grand hospitality to distinguished strangers, we bid them welcome and showed them some of our characteristic sights.

We showed them our system of elementary and secondary schools; especially one district, surrounding the old North Church where Paul Revere hung out his light in Revolutionary days, where two thousand boys and girls, not one of “Native American” birth, are schooled, at the cost of probably $50,000 a year. Every child in the city of Boston in now offered a better education, free of cost, then could have been bought, by the richest man in Massachusetts in my boyhood, including the opportunity of reading a million books, with the training, in mechanics and home industries and the profession of teaching. Then we gave them an hour at the Waltham watch factories, which represents a community of five thousand people; we showed them a shoe shop and a rubber manufactory, giving to every distinguished visitor a part of shoes and rubbers made during his visit. The majority of these working people were women.

One of the most distinguished gentlemen, of this company, himself a man of high culture and exalted public position in one of the South American Republics, said to me: “We are filled with astonishment at what we see everywhere in your country. We have been told, all our lives, that you. Americans were very rich, but a very mercenary and materialistic people, with little regard for the higher thing of life. But what do we see? Every thing belonging to the higher interests of society supported as no where else in the world; Religion; Charity, as boundless as the sea; the most extensive system of education; the love of letters; the most enlightened regard for your working class; the most humane arrangements for the reformation of criminals, and the most powerful instrumentalities for social reform; and all these are not support by a government placed above you, but by your own will and pleasure, by the whole people working together to build the upper side of society as no where else. And these young women we have seen today in your manufacturing establishments; they are better educated, more intelligent, more agreeable socially, more fit to be the companion of a superior man, than the women of the highest social caste in our own country.”

The American people have no; inaugurated this great movement for Industrial Education simply to put the national brain in 0025 26connection with the national hand for the purpose of making more money, or only because intelligent labor with skilled leadership is more profitable than ignorant labor even under competent supervision. Of this fact we can be shown an object lesson in the state of Massachusetts which, during the past two hundred and fifty years has stuck to the original proposition recorded in the law of the Massachusetts Bay Colony of 1647 that every child should be assured of an elementary and every boy encouraged to aspire to a superior education. The result is that ten years ago the average product of the various industries in the state was two and a half times the sum of the average American product, $1.05 instead of .45 a day. This represents an annual excess of two hundred and fifty millions of dollars to the state.

The best people in our country are now behind this nation-movement for Industrial Education because they see in it a demand for more of the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord's Prayer, the Beautitudes, the Golden Rule, the Supreme law of love to God and man put into the soul and thence transferred to the good right hand of every man and woman in his or her own peculiar work.

And this reform in the morale of American industry must begin where all permanent reforms in society begin; at the base and not the summit of society. Eighty of every one hundred men in our country now possessed of one hundred thousand dollars began life at the bottom of the ladder, many of them amid surrounding where even the honest and fair notions of commerce and trade were not in the ascendent. These men are now too often the same sort of business men as they were boys. Instead of trading jack knives and swapping marbles, “playing for keeps,” robbing orchards, dodging school examinations, getting on the blind side of the school mistress and “playing hockey,” they are now managing corporations, building railroads, engineering trusts, and generally tranacting the business of the country according to the ideas that prevail among the vast majority of what are called the laboring and working classes of the nation. Any man whose youth was spent in a country store of the United States, fifty years ago, if he will recall his own experience, will be at no loss to account for all that is going on among the millionaires of today.

There is little danger that Admiral Sampson's fleet will be compelled to hunt the new Spanish Armada very far inland up any of the rivers of North Carolina, because there is not water enough to float a battleship in any of them. The great industrial pirate craft, of which we hear such eloquent denunciation in the 0026 27national capital, like our great contending fleets, can only cruise in deep water. And the industrial “deep sea” in this and every civilized nation is the low morality of the ordinary business life; in our country found especially in the common habits of the farm, in the household, in the country store; wherever men and women bargain and trade and face each other in the sharp rivalries of their every day life. And the idea of suppressing the great organized abuses, of whose existence no well-informed man is ignorant and whose dealings in many ways no good man can approve, in any other way than by a vast dispensation of the gospel of Industrial Education according to the “pattern shown on the mount” among all classes and conditions of people especially the class whose illiteracy is a perpetual national temptation, may suit the purpose of men who are climbing to office up a slippery ladder, who are defaming the people that are prosperous and flattering the people who fail, and thereby inaugurating a war of classes and races compared with which our tremendous civil conflict of the sections was a sham fight for the amusement of a picnic on a general training day.

This great moral reform must come to the two millions of children and youth of our eight million colored citizens through a better training in the home, and a more vital ministry of righteousness in the church. But the people look especially to the 26,500 colored teachers who in 1896 had under instruction, nominally, one million four hundred thousand, but in “average attendance” only $87,000, not one-third of the 2,800,000 of their race from five to eighteen years of age in these sixteen states and the District of Columbia, for the most earnest, successful work in this direction.

And the people, not the hostile and the indifferent, but the friendly people of the country, are now trying to find out how it is that after the expenditure of $100,000,000 by the South, and $50,000,000 by the North and the nation during the past twenty-five years for the free schooling of some two millions of colored children and youth, with a common school in almost every district and a graded school in a large number of the cities and villages, with a hundred academies, high schools and colleges, and probably thirty thousand students, and with the prodiguous interest awakened at home and abroad for the education of the freedmen; we can only this year show less than 900,000 of the one million four hundred thousand enrolled in daily attendance in common schools; and fifty per cent. above the age of ten are still unable to read; and four great states show an illiteracy of from sixty-five to seventy-two per cent of their entire colored population.

0027 28

However we may be inclined to rejoice over what has been done, it cannot be denied that here has not been a notable success. And the educational public of the country is now trying to locate the responsibility. It is not questioned that all the agencies have probably wrought according to their light. Certainly great good has come from the moral and religious training in the great schools now in the land, and a superior class of young men and women has been developed who are rising to the opportunities of the greater work ahead. It is true, as stated by Dr. Curry, that, “so far, our attempts at the education of the colored race have been largely tentative.” This is certainly no time for controversy, but for conference on the admitted lack of eminent success.

But it is certain that for the coming twenty years the educational public will look more than ever to the teachers of the common schools and the institutions that are advertised to prepare them for their difficult work, for a larger result. And especially does the country demand that the colored teachers who have the opportunity shall be more than willing to qualify themselves by thorough preparation for their profession by the union of industrial with moral and mental training in these schools. For we must not forget that the religious and moral condition of a people whose educated youth are trying to shirk the common work of life and whose adult people are largely content to plod on in the old-world habits of the old-time illiterate masses of Europe, is certainly no qualification for full membership in the kingdom of Heaven in the United States of America.

The people desire that the graduates of these great educational institutions, so bountifully supplied for their training, should realize that in this very work referred to is the opportunty for a missionary service of the most radical sort, such as was never before offered to a generation of educated young men and women since the world began. This is the ministry to which they are called. It is to teach these little boys and girls to be better in little things; to do each little job of work “upon honor,” to learn to live worthily in the society of the school room, and to “play fair” out of doors: and, as they grow up, to live the life of this world without the heathenism of selfishness, contempt and pride, “in love perferring one another,” helping and not hindering, jearning to work in every occupation not as if labor were the curse of God but rather the noblest opportunity of every human being. For my work is the one department of life where I can best show my relationship to God. Here I am, a 0028 29creator in my own domain. We look to these teachers to lift the children of to day above the pernicious contempt for labor which binds the soul and body in the most degrading bondage; the notion that social and personal superiority are in proportion to idleness. The gospel for young America today is; “Whoever would be greatest among you, let him be your servant.” “The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister.” “Whatsoever thy hands find to do, that do with thy might;“ the might of your physical force, the might of your intellect, the might of your conscience, the might of your noblest manhood and womanhood. Then indeed, in the words of good old George Herbert, “you can sweep a room and make the action fine.” Or in the grander words of the old scripture:— “Whether you eat or drink or whatsoever you do, do all to the glory of God.”

Here is found the final test of a true “Christian Education” It is through the family, the church and the school to help the American child and youth become the sort of person that the Son of Man was, at home in his father's carpenter's shop; at school, seeking wisdom of the doctors in the temples: even after that “obedient to his parents;“ waiting patiently till the custom of his country called him to his divine ministry, not as a precocious and sensational “boy preacher,” but at the age of thirty in the full maturity of his divine manhood.

After an experience of half a century in a ministry of religion; for the last twenty years a Ministry of Education, in all the sixteen southern states of the Union; I am firm in the conclusion that whatever may be possible with God in his Providence, there is only one way under heaven by which an American boy or girl can be saved from failure to achieve the sovereign citizenship of the United States that today is the highest earthly position of every man or woman who can meet its exalted demands. This is the old way by which the Son of Mary, the child Jesus, grew up from the manger to the cross; filling every position in life; the perfect child, the model youth, the divine man, the leader of the race in its appointed destiny of saving the soul by bringing in the Kingdom of God on earth. It matters not in what style of manger our American child is cradled, “The straight gate and the narrow way that leadeth to life” stand wide open for every boy and girl in this broad land. Nobody can finally hinder him who walks with courage, intelligence, consecration and the holy obstinacy of doing his own work, for “whoever endureth to the end shall be saved.” Believe it, young men and women, no man, no combination of men, no unfriendly community or state, can hold back one of you from your true place in life, if you do not assist. 0029 30Says Thomas Carlyle; “No book was ever written down except by itself” No man was ever “confounded” unless he first confounded himself.

The final demand of the American educational public; last but not the least in importance; the third essential condition of Industrial Education, is that the present twenty millions of American boys and girls shall be taught the fit use of money. For even with the ability, skill and character required to justify the saying of old Dr. Johnson, of dictionary fame; “After all the parsons say, a man is seldom better employed than in honestly making money,” there is another side to our magnificent American industrial life, of equal necessity to our national glory and honor; the proper use of money.

This country is already the richest nation in the world. And it is not a country where the “rich are growing richer and the poor growing poorer,” as certain of our orators say. No power on earth can hold back a lazy and shiftless, or a willful or wicked young man or woman, from poverty, disgrace and destruction. But there is no land under the sun where an intelligent, honest, industrious and economical family, that is not “a house divided against itself,” is so sure of a comfortable living, with such wide opportunities for superior financial ability to obtain permanent and even abundant possessions, as our own.

The colored people of this sort, to-day, in our southern states handle more money than the Pilgrim fathers who struck Plymouth Rock two hundred and seventy-eight years ago saw for a half a century. The state of Massachusetts is to day one of the most prosperous communities on earth, because these people in their poverty and perii, brought up every child to work and taught him how to save on the lower side in order to spend on the upper side of life. There is no patent on this method of making and using money. The way is wide open, to native or foreign, to every boy and girl of every race, class or condition. In this way a people is all the time growing in that intelligence, virtue, versatile ability and patriotism that is the motive power of all the permanent prosperity that has made our country the wonder of the world; hated by every oppressor of humanity; to day going forth armed with all the powers of modern life to warn the “back number” among the nations to leave this continent and retire to her own proper dominion, there to study the ways and means and methods of a modern Christian civilization.

You, young men and women, must realize that American Society is not constructed on the old-world and old-time system of the protection of the lower masses by a superior class, or a 0030 31paternal government. The republic does call on every commonwealth for the due protection of every citizen of whatever station in life, in the enjoyments of all his legal rights, in order that every man may be free to help himself to all he can rightly use. But the idea that any political party, the national or any local government, any church or any organization for the aid of any class, is bound to lift and hold up at arms length for any considerable time any set of people that insists on living in a state of prolonged childhood, is a “delusion and a snare.”

The young men and women who are now going out from the great schools established for their training, into the leadership of their race by the churches in their own and their friends in other states, should divest themselves of the idea that there is any other way by which their people can rise to its own proper place in American life than that by which the people of every other nationality or race has risen in the United States. It is by no means the misfortune of the Negro that he is the latest comer upon the threshold of our American civilization. He enjoys thereby the same opportunity as my son, born thirty years later into this world than his father. In no previous age or land could a people like this, thrown upon our shores and enslaved by the European semi-barbarism of three hundred years ago, have risen to the present position and opportunity now enjoyed by our eight millions of colored citizens in this republic. It was the special privilege of this people that it came up, even during its years of bondage, exempt from the three curses; war, pestilence and famine; the three furies of the prayer book, which decimated every generation of every great European people in its long and bloody upward track toward its present estate.

Where can we find, elsewhere such an opportunity for the development of a people like this as in our sixteen southern states? Here is a region, more extensive than imperial Rome, of boundless resources, cheap lands everywhere needing the labor of every man and woman even developed to tenfold the present efficiency and skill. This boundless realm is now inhabited by only two-thirds the population of the British Island; one-half the size of one our great “all-out-doors” southern states. And the colored population is at least one-third of the whole; a majority in three; a most important contingent in every remaining commonwealth and the district of Columbia.

It is the priviledge and the solemn obligation of these young men and women to tell these things to the two million five hundred thousand children and youth of the colored race, and while telling to warn them against the foolish and vicious notion that the nation 0031 32or any part of it is conspiring to reduce them again to the “previous condition” of their fathers. To whom should we look for the foremost leadership of this multitude of children? Your country expects that you, young men, young women, after such an education as you have gained at the expense of your state or of your friends in other states, will put on your working clothes and go forth as the “guides, philosophers and friends” of your people in their pilgrimage through their forty years of wilderness, across their Jordan, into their promised land. And, believe me, the way out of this wilderness is the same old dusty track of toil and sacrifice and mutual helpfulness by which every American state has been lifted from its beginnings up to its present eminence among the commonwealths of the earth.

There is no longer a question in the mind of any competent and friendly observer, concerning the capacity of the eight millions of this people for good American citizenship. If in its past condition it has done its part, and so great a part, in leading every state of the South from the wilderness of three centuries ago to its present hopeful condition, what doubt can there be that through the aid of the beneficent system of modern Industrial Education as I have set it forth today, it can attain an efficiency that will make the new South of the 20th century look back on the old South of the 19th century as a reminiscence of a far off childhood.

But the moving power in this great uplift must be the combined moral, mental and executive force of the whole people, represented in the young men and women and children now in the homes, the schools and the churches of this and every sister commonwealth. And the better I am acquainted with the condition of affairs in these states, the stronger is my conviction that in no country upon earth, today, is there such an opportunity of building up a great civilization of the modern Christian type among a people so teachable, so numerous, so capable of being exalted to its own fit and permanent place, as among the eight millions in behalf of whom I speak.

And of all classes of this same people, none has a nobler opportunity of genuine distinction in Christian manhood and womanhood than you whom I address. Compare the opportunity given to any body of educated young people in Boston, Chicago, New York, in any American city or rural district in our powerful and populous northern states, with that enjoyed by you, for influential service to your own state and the Republic. Less than fifty thousand of you are offered the mental, social and industrial leadership of the eight millions of your people; a nation within a 0032 33nation. Whatever you know and do and are, that will thousands and tens of thousands of these boys and girls reach upward to know, to do and to become. Your ideas of life will be the inspiration of the coming millions of children and youth, a warning to the worst, a beacon light to the best. I do not expect of you any spectacular display of unusual excellence. I only ask you to rise up to your great “calling and election.” Such an occasion may never come to another generation of your race in this land. It is the same message as came to the fathers and mothers of the New Republic one hundred years ago. May you respond in the same spirit of consecration, pledging “your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor” for your country's good. Then history may write a new chapter of your achievements in the awakening and educating a people twice as numerous as the three millions of colonial Americans who were led by the great fathers and mothers who have earned the reverence of mankind in the days goneby.

And do not forget your obligation to your country, now in the hour of its uprising to do the will of God in the deliverance of one of the fairest of this world's domains from the oppression and misrule of four long centuries. This country is your country. It is the country of the people who live in it, who are now doing its work, developing its resources, and are bound in any hour of peril to defend it with their lives.

It is not for me to judge concerning the duty of any young man now before me to respond to the loud call of the nation to go forth on land or sea in a cause that so appeals to every generous heart and approves itself to every thoughtful mind. But it is for me, invited to speak to you on this day consecrated to high thinking and noble resolve, to remind you that the patriotism which has built up this goodly land of light and freedom was rooted and nourished by and has grown up to its mighty power of achievement and endurance from the common life of the common people.

The men in our past who have been ready to fight for their country even unto death, and the women who have been strong and constant to hold them up to their great sacrifice, are the people who during the years of peace, have learned to live for their country to live in the performance of all the homely, common, monotonous, wearisome and often almost unendurable duties, in the life that is common to us all; to conquer its discouragements, to surmount its failures and, out of the heart of its temptations and perils to build up a strong, sweet and all prevailing Christian manhood and womanhood. And it is because I see 0033 34with every new year, a greater multitude of your generous youth learning to live for their country in the place where God has called them, that I look to the fifty millions of your people in some coming century to become one of the most important and beneficent elements of that wonderous complex and cosmopolitan order of American Society which in some one of God's great years, sure to come will hear its call to the leadership of mankind.