one-half are ignorant; not only are one-half the voters ignorant, but because of this ignorant vote corruption, dishonesty in a dozen forms has crept into the exercise of the political franchise to the extent that the conscience of the intelligent class is seared in its attempts to defeat the will of the ignorant voters; here, then, you have on the one hand an ignorant vote, and on the other an intelligent vote largely minus a conscience. The time may not be far off when to this kind of jury we shall have to look for the verdict that is to decide the course of our democratic institutions. When a great national calamity stares us in the face we are, I fear, too much given to depending on a short "campaign of education" to do on the hustings what should have been accomplished in the school-room.

It has been proven that education unfits the negro for work, and that education also makes him more valuable as a laborer; that he is our greatest criminal, and that he is our most lawabiding citizen. But in spite of this confusion I know that, whether we are increasing or decreasing, whether we are getting better or worse, whether we are valuable or valueless, that a few years ago fourteen of us were brought into this country, and now there are ten millions of us. I know that whenever our life touches yours we help or hinder; that wherever your life touches ours you make us stronger or weaker. Further, I know that almost every other race that has tried to live in the midst of the Anglo-Saxon race, that has tried to look the white man in the face, has disappeared. I know that with all the conflicting opinions, and with a full knowledge of all our weaknesses, only a few centuries ago we went into slavery in this country pagans, we came out Christians; we went into slavery a piece of property, we came out American citizens; we went into slavery without a language, we came out speaking the proud Anglo-Saxon tongue; we went into slavery with the slave chains clanking about our wrists, we came out with the American ballot in our hands. I submit to a candid and sober judgment if a race capable of such a test, such a transformation, is not worth saving and making a part in reality as well as in name of our democratic government.

That the negro may be fitted for the fullest enjoyment of the privileges and responsibilities of our country, it is important that we be honest and candid with the negro himself, whether our honesty and candor for the time being pleases or displeases him. It is with an ignorant race as it is with a child; it craves at first the superficial, the ornamental, the signs of progress rather than the reality. The ignorant race is tempted to

jump, at one bound, to the position that it has required years of hard struggle for others to reach.

The temptation in educational and missionary work is to do for a people that which was done a thousand years ago, or is being done for a people a thousand miles away, without always making a careful study of the needs and conditions of the people whom we are trying to help. The temptation is to run all people through a certain educational mold, regardless of the condition of the subject or the end to be accomplished. Unfortunately for us as a race, Our education was begun, immediately after the war, in many cases too nearly where New England education ended. We seemed to overlook the fact that we were dealing with a race that had little occasion to labor in their native land, and consequently brought little love for labor with them to America. Added to this was the fact that they had been forced for 250 years to labor without compensation, under circumstances that were calculated to do anything but teach them to see the dignity, beauty and civilizing power of intelligent labor. We forgot the industrial education that was given the Pilgrim Fathers of New England in clearing and planting its cold, bleak and snowy hills and valleys, in the providing of shelter, founding the small mills and factories, in supplying themselves with home-made garments, thus laying the foundation of an industrial life that now keeps going a large part of the colleges and missionary effort of the world.

At least 80 per cent. of my people in the South are found in the rural districts, and they are dependent upon agriculture in some form for their support. Notwithstanding that we are practically a whole race dependent upon agriculture, and notwithstanding 30 years have passed since our freedom, aside from what has been done at Hampton and Tuskegee, and one or two other institutions, not a thing has been attempted by State or philanthopy in the way of educating the race in this one industry on which their very existence depends.

A short time ago, in one of our Southern cities, a colored man died who had received training as a skilled mechanic during the days of slavery. By his skill and industry he built up a great business as a house contractor and builder. In this same city there are 35,000 colored people, among them young men who have been well educated in the languages and literature, but not a single one could be found who had been so trained in mechanical and architectural drawing that he could carry on the business which this ex-slave had built up, and so it was soon scat

tered to the wind. Almost no colored men trained in the principles of architecture, notwithstanding the vast majority of our race is without homes! Notwithstanding the three prime conditions for growth, for civilization, are food, clothing and shelter, yet we have been the slaves of forms and customs to such an extent that we have failed in a large measure to look matters squarely in the face and meet actual needs. You cannot graft a fifteenth century civilization on to a twentieth century civilization by the mere performance of mental gymnastics. I speak in no fault-finding spirit, but with a feeling of deep gratitude for all that has been done; but the future must be an improvement on the past.

Few, I fear, realize what is to be done before the eight millions of my people in the South can be made a safe, helpful, progressive part of our institutions. The South in proportion to its ability has done well, but this does not change facts. In spite of all that has been done, I was in a county in Alabama a few days ago where there are some 30,000 colored people and about 7,000 whites. In this county not a single public school for negroes has been open this year longer than three months, not a single colored teacher has been paid more than $15 per month for his teaching. Not one of these schools was taught in a building that was worthy of the name of schoolhouse. Each colored child has spent on him this year for his education about 50 cents, while each one of your children has spent on him this year for education not far from $20. And yet each citizen of this county is expected to share the burdens and privileges of our democratic form of government just as intelligently and conscientiously as the citizens of your beloved New York. A vote in this county means as much to the nation as a vote in the city of Boston. Crime in this county is as truly an arrow aimed at the heart of the government as crime committed in your own streets.

My remarks thus far have referred mainly to my own race. But there is another side. The longer I live and the more I study the question the more I am convinced that it is not so much a problem as to what you will do with the negro as what the negro will do with you and your civilization. The most eloquent recent representative of the white South not long ago, in a Boston banquet hall, gave utterance to this declaration: The supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever and the dominion of the negro race resisted at all hazards." My love for the whole South is such that I would go further; I would change this declaration; I would make it broader, deeper and more

Christ-like; I would make this proposition read: "The supremacy of the most virtuous, intelligent and substantial individual or race in the South is to be maintained and the advance of all races is to be assisted forever, not resisted." Standing thus, this utterance would need no modification to make it fit the growing intelligence and liberality of the world, and would teach the lesson that the South and the world needs to be taught.

As bearing upon democracy and education, what of your white brethren in the South, those who suffered and are still suffering the consequences of American slavery for which both you and they were responsible? You of the great and prosperous North still owe to your less fortunate brethren of the Caucasian race in the South not less than to yourselves, a serious and uncompleted duty. What was the task you asked them to perform? Returning to their destitute homes after years of war to face blasted hopes, devastation, shattered industrial system, you asked them to add to their own burdens that of preparing in education, politics and economics, in a few short years, for citizenship, four millions of former slaves. That the South, staggering under the burden, made blunders, and that in a measure there has been disappointment, no one need be surprised. The educators, the statesmen, the philanthropists, have never comprehended their duty toward the millions of poor whites in the South who were buffeted for 200 years between slavery and freedom, between civilization and degradation, who were disregarded by both master and slave. It needs no prophet to tell the character of our future civilization when the poor white boy in the country districts of the South receives one dollar's worth of education and your boy twenty dollars' worth, when one never enters a reading-room or library, and the other has reading-rooms and libraries in every ward and town, when one hears a lecture or sermon once in two months, and the other can hear a lecture or sermon every day in the year. When you help the South you help yourselves. Mere abuse will not bring about the remedy. The time has come, it seems to me (and if the present war accomplishes nothing else, I pray God it will accomplish this), when in this matter we should rise above party, or race, or sectionalism into the region of duty of man to man, citizen to citizen, Christian to Christian, and if the negro, who has been oppressed and denied rights in a Christian land, can help you North and South to rise, can be the medium of your rising into this atmosphere of generous Christian brotherhood and self-forgetfulness, he will see in it a recompense for all that he has suffered in the past.

Some years ago a bright young man of my race succeeded in entering the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. Says this young man in describing his stay at this institution:

"I was several times attacked with stones, and was forced finally to appeal to the officers, when a marine was detailed to accompany me across the campus to and from mess hall at meal times." I recite this incident not for the purpose merely of condemning the wrong done a member of my race; no, no, not that. I mention the case not for the sake of the one cadet, but for the sake of the 400 cadets, for the sake of the 400 American families, the 400 American communities whose civilization and Christianity these cadets represented. Here were 400 and more picked young men, representing the flower of our land, who had passed through our common schools and were preparing themselves at public expense to defend the honor of our country. And yet, with grammar, reading and arithmetic in the public schools, and with lessons in the arts of war and the principles of physical courage at Annapolis, both systems seem to have utterly failed to so prepare a single one of these young men for real life, that he could be brave enough, Christian enough, American enough, to take this poor, defenseless black boy by the hand in open daylight and let the world know that he was his friend. Education, whether of white or black man, that gives one physical courage to stand in front of the cannon and fails to give him moral courage to stand up in defense of right and justice is a failure.

With all that your colleges and public schools stand for in their equipment, their endowment, their wealth and culture, their instructors, can they produce mothers that will produce boys that will not be ashamed to have the world know that they are friends to the most unfortunate of God's creatures? Can the New York Board of Regents put in motion an influence that will penetrate down through university, college, acad

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emy and high school, that will set the standard of citizenship so high as will make impossible, in our democratic life, distinctions that only serve to hurt and degrade the individual or race that inflicts them?

We are one in this country. The question of the highest citizenship and the complete education of all concerns ten millions of my people and sixty millions of yours. We rise as you rise; when we fall you fall. When we are strong you are strong; when we are weak you are weak. There is no power that can separate our destiny. The negro can afford to be wronged; the white man cannot afford to wrong him. Unjust laws or customs that exist in many places regarding the races injure the white man and inconvenience the negro. No race can wrong another race simply because it has the power to do so without being permanently injured in morals. The negro can endure the temporary inconveniences, but the injury to the white man is permanent. It is for the white man to save himself from this degradation that I plead. If a white man steals a negro's ballot it is the white man who is permanently injured. Physical death comes to the one negro lynched in a county, but death of the morals, death of the soul, comes to the thousands responsible for the lynching.

We are a patient, humble race. We can afford to work and wait. There is plenty in this country for us to do. Away up in the atmosphere of goodness, forbearance, patience, long-suffering and forgiveness the workers are not many or overcrowded. If others would be little, we can be great. If others would be mean, we can be good. If others would push us down, we can help push them up. Character, not circumstances, makes the man. It is more important that we be prepared to hold office than that we hold office; more important that we be prepared for the highest recognition than that we be recognized.

ONSPICUOUS and predominant among the educational needs of the United States to-day is the need for extending our high school system.

Nearly all of our cities and towns and some of our larger villages already enjoy a very liberal development of this system and their youth are able to acquire an education that fits them

for the ordinary duties of life. Though many of the so-called high schools fall below the proper standard, still our present high school education is a fairly comprehensive system, whose provisions are liberal, whose results are good and whose aims are distinctly high and important, because tending to elevate the standard of average intelligence and to advance our

"A RURAL STUDENT." From Cyr's 2d Reader. Courtesy GINN & Co. equal benefit to all our youth, are to-day, because of the high school feature in the towns tending to divide our citizens into those for whose training and development a fairly suitable provision has been made, and those whose advantages are confined to the rural school with its limited curriculum and still more meagre equipment. That these two classes will show marked and undesirable contrasts is as certain as that effect follows cause. The urban-bred citizen will be more alert, progressive, polished, more resourceful, more capable of discerning or creating opportunities within his environments or of seeking them beyond, and thus better fitted to fight the battle of life. His rural-bred contemporary will be far less capable of handling new questions or treating complex subjects, less

capable of adapting himself to new conditions when forced out of his accustomed sphere, or of making the most of any environment because of natural powers not so well developed. Such inequality of opportunity does not become a nation which disavows all class distinctions, whose antecedents are democratic and which professes to be such in principle and practice.

This division is not fanciful. It shows itself in the diversity of opinion and purpose frequently attributed to conflicting personal or sectional interests. Educational inequality will tend to increase and intensify such unfortunate antagonisms, and the most certain and effective means of counteracting them is to place all communities and classes in the matter of public education upon an even footing.

In cities and towns where a liberal educational policy has long prevailed it is found that the tax rate is lowest. The common council of the capital of New Jersey recently voted to erect a high school building, and a committee appointed to visit other cities and towns for the purpose of learning the most modern and desirable plans of construction reported, incidentally, the fact that an adequate provision for public education is not only in the interest of morality, enterprise and social advancement, but is also a measure of economy. A higher standard of intelligence tends to a larger average of personal and family possession. This means a greater total aggregate of wealth, and the larger the assessable value of any district or municipality the lower the tax rate required to secure a definite sum. Whatever promotes prosperity lessens the demand of charity and the cost of maintaining government. It is far wiser and more humane to give $5.00 to the cause of education than to pay twice this amount for the support of alms-houses, penitentiaries and courts of justice. The one city of my acquaintance most niggardly in the support of its schools is most heavily burdened with the care of its poor and the control of its criminal element. The broadest, truest and most effective charity is the humane foresight that so trains the head, the hand and the heart as to give the masses right views of life, makes them valued and valuable members of our social fabric, which causes them to be self-reliant and self-helpful, and makes them good citizens. This is the debt which wealth owes the commonwealth which gives it protection and which has made its accumulation possible.

The products of the soil not only furnish almost our entire support, but constitute the basis of our national prosperity. Their cultiva