548 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



make it interesting, and probably no one thing would do more to efface 

 the lingering class distinctions of the south than a well developed and 

 widespread system of industrial education. The man or woman who 

 has skill in your own handicraft commands your respect, no matter 

 who his forebears may have been, and the guild, even though it be 

 unorganized, founded ■ on some form of mental comradeship, is an effi- 

 cient corrective for many unwholesome class distinctions. Industrial 

 training is also preeminently valuable to the south because it is based 

 on science. To acquire it is to acquire inevitably to some degree the 

 scientific habit of thought, that is to say, the habit of thought which 

 not only demands facts but respects them, and to which law means not 

 the whim of man, but the unrelenting edict of nature with all its in- 

 evitable penalties. To displace even an a priori theory of how to 

 make hens la}' by one based upon an open-minded study of facts, is to 

 make an advance in methods of thinking which must ultimately react 

 upon other things than hens. The calm and impersonal methods of 

 science, once given a foothold, even in the dairy or the poultry yard, 

 must in the end dislodge that impassioned a 'priori reasoning which 

 has been the bane and weakness of the south for so many generations. 

 But the teaching of science is expensive; it means laboratories and 

 experiment stations and provisions for individual work. It means, in 

 short, those endowments in which the south is deficient. 



The second strategic need is for the best possible normal training. 

 The lamp of learning, if learning it can be called, has been passed on 

 in one southern hamlet and another from gentlewoman to gentlewoman, 

 who has brought to her work the traditions of culture, the refinement 

 and the care-taking habit which were her birthright. Thirty years ago 

 she was not greatly behind teachers in other parts of the country in 

 professional training — since practically no one had any — ^but each year 

 since then has put her at a greater comparative disadvantage. Nothing 

 in the history of the south is more promising than the eager desire for 

 professional education which many of its teachers are now showing, 

 and, in so far as they come from the old ruling class, they have the 

 power to confer upon their public a double benefit. A certain con- 

 descension towards teachers is apt to linger in the minds of a com- 

 mercial community, in spite of fervent lip-service. But when the 

 teachers come largely, as they are apt to do in the south, from the class 

 which represents the most deeply rooted traditions of a community, 

 that phase of crudity may be short lived, if not altogether avoided. 



The third need of the south is a cordon of secondary schools, finan- 

 cially independent of their patrons. They may be independent as the 

 pu])lic school is independent or they may be made so by endowment, but 

 independent they must be, if they are to do their best work. This is 

 an inviting field for endowment, as $100,000 will do for a school what 



