If the colored people got any good out of slavery it was the habit of work. In this respect the masses of the colored people are different from most races among whom missionary effort is made, in that the negro as a race works. You will not find anything like that high tension of activity that is maintained here; still the negro works, whether the call for labor comes from the rice swamps of the Carolinas, the cotton plantations of Alabama, or the sugar cane bottoms of Louisiana, the negro is ready to answer it-yes, toil is the badge of all his tribe, though he may do his work in the most shiftless and costly manner, still with him it is labor. I know you will find a class around railroad stations and corners of streets that loaf, just as you will find among my people, and we have got some black sheep in our flock, as there are in all flocks, but the masses in their humble way are industrious.

The trouble centers here: Through the operations of the mortgage system, high rents, the allurements of cheap jewelry and bad whisky, and the gewgaws of life, the negro is deprived of the results of his labor. Unused to self-government, unused to the responsibility of controlling our own earnings or expenditures, or even our own children, it could not be expected that we could take care of ourselves in all respects for several generations. The great need of the negro to-day is intelligent, unselfish leadership in his educational and industrial life.

Let me illustrate, and this is no fancy sketch: Ten years ago a young man born in slavery found his way to the Tuskegee school. By small cash payments and work on the farm he finished the course with a good English education and a practical and theoretical knowledge of farming. Returning to his country home where fivesixths of the citizens were black, he still found them mortgaging their crops, living on rented land from hand to mouth, and deeply in debt. School had never lasted longer than three months, and was taught in a wreck of a log cabin by an inferior teacher. Finding this condition of things, the young man to whom I have referred took the three months public school as a starting point. Soon he organized the older people into a club that came together every week. In these meetings the young man instructed as to the value of owning a home, the evils of mortgaging, and the importance of educating their children. He taught them how to save money, how to sacrifice to live on bread and potatoes until they could get out of debt, begin buying a home, and stop mortgaging. Through the lessons and influence of these meetings, the first year of this young man's work these people built up by their contributions in money and labor a nice frame schoolhouse that replaced the wreck of a log cabin. The next year this work was continued and those people, out of their own pockets, added two months to the original three months' school term. Month by month has been added to the school term till it now lasts seven months every year. Already fourteen families within a radius of 10 miles have bought and are buying homes, a large proportion have ceased to mortgage their crops and are raising their own food supplies. In the midst of all was the young man educated at Tuskegee, with a model cottage and a model farm that served as an example and center of light for the whole community.

My friends, I wish you could have gone with me some days ago to this community and have seen the complete revolution that has been wrought in their industrial, educational, and religious life by the work of this one teacher, and I wish you could have looked with me into their faces and seen them beaming with hope and delight. I wish you could have gone with me into their cottages, containing now two and three rooms, through their farms, into their church and Sunday school. Bear in mind that not a dollar was given these people from the outside with which to make any of these changes; they all came about by reason of the fact that they had this leader, this guide, this Christian, to show them how to utilize the results of their own labor, to show them how to take the money that had hitherto been scattered to the wind in mortgaging, high rents, cheap jewelry and whisky, and to concentrate in the direction of their own uplifting. My people do not need or ask for charity to be scattered among them; it is very seldom you ever see a black hand in any part of this country reached forth for alms. It is not for alms we ask, but for leaders who will lead and guide and stimulate our people till they can get upon their own feet. Wherever they have been given a leader, something of the kind I have described, I have never yet seen a change fail to take place, even in the darkest community.

In our attempt to elevate the South one other thing must be borne in mind. I do not know how you find it here, but in Alabama we find it a pretty hard thing to make a good Christian of a hungry man. I think I have learned that we might as well settle down to the uncompromising fact that our people will grow in proportion as we teach them that the way to have the most of Jesus, and in a permanent form, is to mix in with their religion some land, cotton, and corn, a house with two or three rooms, and a little bank account; with these things interwoven with our religion there will be a foundation for growth on which we can build for all time. What I have tried to indicate are some of the lessons that we are disseminating into every corner of the black belt of the South, through the work of our graduates and

through the Tuskegee negro conferenco, that brings together at Tuskegee once a year 800 of the representatives of the black yeomanry of the South to lay plans, to get light and encouragement, and thus add the strength of mothers and fathers to the strength of the schoolroom and pulpit. More than anything else Tuskegee is a great college settlement dropped into the midst of a mass of ignorance that is gradually but slowly leavening the whole lump.

Of this you can be sure that it matters not what is said the black man is doing or is not doing, regardless of entanglements or discouragements, the rank and file of my race is now giving itself to the acquiring of education, character, and property in a way that it has never done since the dawn of our freedom. The chance that we ask is, by your help and encouragement, to be permitted to move on unhindered and unfettered for a few more years, and with this chance, if the Bible is right and God is true, there is no power that can permanently stay our progress. Neither here nor in any part of the world do people come into close relations with a race that is to a large extent empty handed and empty headed. One race gets close to another in proportion as they are drawn in commerce, in proportion as the one gets hold of something that the other wants or respects-commerce, we must acknowledge, in the light of history, is the great forerunner of civilization and peace. Whatever friction exists between the black man and white man in the South will disappear in proportion as the black man, by reason of his intelligence and skill, can create something that the white man wants or respects; can make something, instead of all the dependence being on the other side. Despite all her faults, when it comes to business pure and simple, the South presents an opportunity to the negro for business that no other section of the country does. The negro can sooner conquer Southern prejudice in the civilized world than learn to compete with the North in the business world. In field, in factory, in the markets, the South presents a better opportunity for the negro to earn a living than is found in the North. A young man educated in head, hand, and heart, goes out and starts a brickyard, a blacksmith shop, a wagon shop, or an industry by which that black boy produces something in the community that makes the white man dependent on the black man for somethingproduces something that interlocks, knits the commercial relations of the races together, to the extent that a black man gets a mortgage on a white man's house that he can foreclose at will; well, the white man won't drive the negro away from the polls when he sees him going up to vote. There are reports to the effect that in some sections the black man has difficulty in voting and having counted the little white ballot which he has the privilege of depositing about twice in two years, but there is a little green ballot that he can vote through the teller's window three hundred and thirteen days in every year, and no one will throw it out or refuse to count it. The man that has the property, the intelligence, the character, is the one that is going to have the largest share in controlling the Government, whether he is white or black, or whether in the North or South.

It is important that all the privileges of the law be ours. It is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. Says the great teacher: "I will draw all men unto me." How? Not by force, not by law, not by superficial glitter. Following in the tracks of the lowly Nazarine, we shall continue to work and wait, till by the exercise of the higher virtues, by the products of our brain and hands, we make ourselves so valuable, so attractive to the American nation, that instead of repelling we shall draw men to us because of our intrinsic worth. It will be needless to pass a law to compel men to come into contact with a negro who is educated and has $200,000 to lend. In some respects you already acknowledge that as a race we are more powerful, have a greater power of attraction, than your race. It takes 100 per cent of Anglo-Saxon blood to make a white American. The minute that it is proved that a man possesses one one-hundredth part of negro blood in his veins it makes him a black man; he falls to our side; we claim him. The 99 per cent of white blood counts for nothing when weighed beside 1 per cent of negro blood.

None of us will deny that immediately after freedom we made serious mistakes. We began at the top. We made these mistakes, not because we were black people, but because we were ignorant and inexperienced people. We have spent time and money attempting to go to Congress and State legislatures that could have better been spent in becoming the leading real estate dealer or carpenter in our own county. We have spent time and money in making political stump speeches and in attending political conventions that could better have been spent in starting a dairy farm or truck garden and thus have laid a material foundation, on which we could have stood and demanded our rights. When a man eats another person's food, wears another's clothes, and lives in another's house, it is pretty hard to tell how he is going to vote or whether he votes at all.

Gentlemen of the club, the practical question that comes home to you, and to me as an humble member of an unfortunate race, is, how can we help you in working out the great problem that concerns 10,000,500 of my race, and 60,000,000 of yours.

We are here; you rise as we rise; you fall as we fall; we are strong when you are strong; you are weak when we are weak; no power can separate our destinies. The negro can afford to be wronged in this country; the white man can not afford to wrong him. In the South you can help us to prepare the strong, Christain, unselfish leaders that shall go among the masses of our people and show them how to take advantage of the magnificent opportunities that surround them. In the North you can encourage that education among the masses which shall result in throwing wide open the doors of your offices, stores, shops, and factories in the way that shall give our black men and women the opportunity to earn a dollar. Let it be said of all parts of our country that there is no distinction of race or color in the opportunity to earn an honest living. Throw wide open the doors of industry. We are an humble, patient people; we can afford to work and wait. There is plenty of room at the top. The workers up in the atmosphere of goodness, love, patience, forbearance, forgiveness, and industry are not too many or overcrowded. If others would be little, we can be great; if others bad, we can be good; if others try to push us down, we can help to push them up.

*

Men ask me if measures like those enacted in South Carolina do not hurt and discourage. I answer, Nay, nay; South Carolina and no other State can make a law to harm the black man in great measure. Men may make laws to hinder and fetter the ballot, but men can not make laws that will bind or retard the growth of manhood:

Fleecy locks and black complexion

Can not forfeit Nature's claim;
Skins may differ, but affection

Dwells in white and black the same.

If ever there was a people that obeyed the scriptural injunction, "If they smite thee on one cheek, turn the other also," that people has been the American negro. To right his wrongs the Russian appeals to dynamite, Americans to rebellion, the Irishman to agitation, the Indian to his tomahawk; but the negro, the most patient, the most unresentful and law abiding, depends for the righting of his wrongs upon his songs, his groans, his midnight prayers, and an inherent faith in the justice of his cause, and if we judge the future by the past who may say that the negro is not right? We went into slavery 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 waists, we came out with the American ballot in our hands. Progress, progress is the law of nature; under God it shall be our eternal guiding star.

HIGHER EDUCATION AND THE NEGRO.1

That education is the strength of our Republic, the source of its prosperity, the chief guarantee of its perpetuity, needs no discussion here. Is it necessary to defend in this presence the proposition that higher education, the work of colleges and universities, is indispensable to the existence of any education among any people? What educated nation exists or ever has existed upon the earth without colleges of higher learning? Did common schools ever make an intelligent nation? mon schools ever exist in any nation excepting as the fruit of higher learning? Should we ever have had our common-school system but for our colleges?

Did com

To ask these questions is to answer them. The intelligence of the old world has all come down from her universities. The brighter civilization of America, with all her common-school system, has grown out of Harvard and Yale, Brown and Columbia, and William and Mary, Dartmouth and Williams, each of which was founded before the public school. The college is the fountainhead of all learning, and the only pos sible source of supply for all secondary and primary schools of instruction. The colleges are more. They are the only developers of complete manhood. There can be no well-rounded, thoroughly balanced minds, capable of dealing with principles, measuring forces, comprehending relations, grasping and handling the great questions of public life and human leadership, without the broad culture and thorough discipline which years of life in college alone can insure. Exceptional cases of remarkable genius or of abnormal growth do not vitiate this general rule. It has become an axiom in America, and our 500 colleges have grown out of it.

Said Dr. Shedd, fifty years ago: "The common information of society is nothing more nor less than the fine and diffusive radiance of a more substantial and profound culture. This light penetrating in all directions is like a globe of solid fire. All this general and practical information which distinguishes from a savage (or although civilized yet ignorant) state of society-which distinguishes England and the United States from Africa and South America-did not grow up spontaneously from the earth,

An address delivered before the American Baptist Home Mission Society, at Asbury Park, N. J., May 26, 1893, by Edward C. Mitchell, D. D., president of Leland University, New Orleans, La.

is not the effect of a colder climate or a harder soil. It has been exhaling for centuries from colleges and universities-it has been distilling for ages from the alembic of the scholar's brain." The history of the last fifty years has been accumulating evidences of this great truth, and all nations have been furnishing illustrations of it. A new nation has now come upon the stage. Eight millions of people have been thrust into the center of our civilization. They have been endowed with citizenship, with all its responsibilities, with all its possibilities for good or evil. They constitute about one-eighth part of our body politic. Among them is over one-third of the Baptist denomination of this country. Shall they be educated? Can we afford to leave one stone unturned, one agency unemployed, which might lead this mighty force out of the slough of ignorance and poverty and vice up into the plane of Christian manhood and useful citizenship? There can be but one answer to this question. If we have any love for our country; if we have any regard for our brethren in Christ Jesus; if we have any loyalty to our great Baptist brotherhood, we can not withhold any possible facility for that self-improvement of which, through no fault of their own, they have for centuries been deprived.

It goes without saying in this audience that education is what they need-education, moral, intellectual, physical. Providentially the moral education is not without a substantial basis. The spirit of God has not been absent from this people in their long night of bondage. With all their ignorance and even superstition at times, none can doubt the genuineness of their love to the Divine Master; and, to this day, religion among them is a very potent influence, and is very widespread in its extension. From the census of 1890 it appears that the proportion of white Baptist communicants to the whole white population of the South is about 8 per cent (or 1 in 12), while the proportion of negro Baptist communicants to the whole negro population is 20 per cent (or 1 in 5). Moreover, the moral and religious training of the negro in the days of slavery was by no means altogether neglected. They enjoyed some advantages which have now passed away from them. A large proportion of them not only received a religious training from members of white Christian families, but they were regular attendants upon white churches, and thus intelligently taught the Word of God. That they no longer enter white churches is a thing to be expected under present circumstances; nor can it be regretted if only a proper leadership, out of themselves, can be raised up for them. It is evident, however, that what they need in religious things is not so much the spiritual as the intellectual. It is a better intelligence to guide their religious proclivities which is the onething lacking in many localities.

This brings us to the question: What should be the intellectual training of this people?

If negroes are men and women, members of the human family, endowed with similar capacities and tendencies which appear in other races, then our question is already answered by what wo said in the beginning. If the experience of five hundred years has taught us any wisdom in regard to the processes of human development; if we, in our American republic, have learned anything in the last two centuries as to what constitutes education, and what means and appliances are best to make it effective, then here and now we have a grand opportunity to employ this wisdom for the elevation of a new race. There is nothing for us to do but to put into operation the same agencies by which we ourselves have been educated, taking advantage of all the improvements which modern science has invented, or our past mistakes have suggested.

To imagine that the negro can safely do without any of the institutions or instrumentalities which were essential to our own mental advancement is to assume that the negro is superior to the white man in mental capacity. To deprive him of any of these advantages, which he is capable of using, would be to defraud ourselves, as a nation and a Christian church, of all the added power which his developed manhood should bring to us. It does not seem to be necessary in this audience to discuss the proposition that intelligence is power, and that the only road to intelligence is through mental discipline conducted under moral influences.

What now have we been doing for our brother in black to help him in his life struggle? The work began somewhat as in the days of our fathers. The John Harvards and the Elihu Yales of Pilgrim history found their counterparts in General Fiske, Dr. Phillips, Seymour Straight, and Holbrook Chamberlain, who founded colleges, even before it was possible for many to enter upon the college course, but with a wise forecast for the need that would eventually come and is now actually

upon us.

A little later, about 1876, the people of the South organized public schools. In nearly all the Southern States the same proportionate provision is made for the negro as for the whites, and this is and must ever be the main dependence of the elevation of the negro. With all the honor which is due, and which is cheerfully rendered to Northern benevolence, for the splendid foundations of higher learning, it should not be forgotten that more than ten times as much money has been appropriated by the South for negro education.

It is true that this provision is inadequate for both races. In about one-third of the States an average of only four months per annum of instruction is given. This is not from want of will, but of means. The poverty of the South is yet very great. We of the prosperous North can not understand it. If we did, we should better appreciate the pluck and energy and uncomplaining self-sacrifice with which they adjust themselves to their new conditions and bear their heavy burdens. President Dreher, of Roanoke College, Virginia, has shown by reliable statistics that with all the apparent inferiority of the South in her appointments for education, yet in proportion to her means she is doing even more than the North for this purpose.

But what shall we teach the negro? Shall we give him anything beyond the three R's? By "we," of course, is meant, "we white folks," but Southern white folks have long ceased to teach the negro the common branches at all. This work has all been relegated to negro teachers. Let us take for example Mississippi, which, hitherto, has shared with Louisiana the unenviable distinction among States of having the greatest amount of illiteracy. The State superintendent of public instruction, Mr. J. R. Preston, wrote for the New York Independent last year, in reply to some inquiry: "There is not a white teacher in the colored schools of the State," and this is substantially true of every State of the South. Your Northern friend, who desires to teach the three R's, might travel from Mason and Dixon's line to the Gulf, and he would find every situation preempted. He would have to adopt for himself the Shakespearian lamentation, "Othello's occupation's gone." The only place where he would find primary instruction given by white teachers would be in our own socalled universities. According to the last report from Washington, the white teachers of public schools in the South are in the proportion of 1 to every 42 white pupils, and the colored teachers of 1 to every 51 colored pupils. The entire public-school system for the negro is carried on by negro teachers.

And this not only in the lower grades of instruction. Superintendent Preston informs us that in Mississippi there are over 600 colored teachers who hold first-grade certificates. Now a first-grade certificate, in most States, means that the teacher has passed an examination in algebra, physics, physiology, chemistry, geometry, Latin, civil government, psychology, pedagogy; or, in other words, with the exception of Greck, he is fitted to enter the freshman class in any Southern college. And Superintendent Preston says: "These teachers are examined by a white board. They have just the same questions that the white teachers have. I make them out and I know. And the board was just to them and gave them all they earned, but it is not likely to err on the side of mercy." It is not probable that any Southern State is behind Mississippi in the proportionate number of its colored teachers. Virginia reports 700, North Carolina 761, Arkansas 500; Texas has a different method of classification, but reports 1,900 as "higher than third grade." As regards the kind and amount of education which Mississippi's colored people have received, Superintendent Preston says: "The other day I was conducting an institute where there were 19 colored teachers in attendance, and I found that 18 of them were college gradnates. I went right over into an adjoining county, and took a white institute with 37 in attendance, and found only about one-fourth were college graduates." By college graduates normal graduates are doubtless meant, and, in the case of colored teachers, the normal colleges of our missionary schools.

What, then, I again ask, shall we teach the negro? The answer seems to be as plain as the logic of common sense can make it. Let us teach what our colleges and universities were founded to teach. Let us teach the only thing left for us to teach. Let us teach the only thing that the negro can not do as well for himself. Let us teach the thing which the experience of all the ages and the matured judgment of all true educators has decided to be essential for the full development of manhood. Let us teach the negro who he is and what he is as God made him in his physical and mental structure. Let us teach him what the world is that God has made for him, with all its elements and powers and forces. Let us teach him the history of races and of civilizations, with the laws of that progress. Let us teach him to become master of his own tongue by studying its sources in the ancient world and in classic literature, and master of himself by analyzing the structure and workings of his own mind. In short, let us give him such glimpses of the whole range of science as shall tax his powers to the utmost, while it takes the conceit out of him and brings him nearer to that supreme discovery of Socrates that he "knows nothing."

As Commissioner Harris has well said: "Education, intellectual and moral, is the only means yet discovered that is always sure to help people to help themselves. It produces that divine discontent which goads on the individual and will not let him rest.”

But has the negro the capacity for mental training? Is that a question to-day? I am almost ashamed to discuss it in this presence, but my apology is that I have been requested to do so. It will bear examination from any and every point of view. It is vital to the whole subject before us. If anybody doubts, he should inform