148 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



was the ballot. We failed to see that between the primitive station of 

 our race, two thousand years ago, and its present state there lay twenty 

 centuries of toil and pain, spent in winning the state of mind of the 

 citizen. We mocked the African with the gift of the franchise. We 

 have now to begin where we should have begun thirty -five years ago, 

 with measures that are proportionate to the need — with a system of 

 education that may serve to develop the saving qualities of the race. 

 What should this education be? 



To most of us education begins with an alphabet and goes on to 

 an indeterniined limit of things that are to be had from books. The 

 method is naturally esteemed, for we behold that the useful citizen 

 comes forth from such teaching. Yet, logically, we might as well 

 attribute the shape and quality of the body to the clothes it bears. 

 The real education of our race, that which gives the most of its value 

 to the trifle of instruction we give our children, is clearly a matter of 

 race experience; of training in the generations of deeds since it began 

 to pass from primitive savagery. First came the lessons in the art of 

 continually laboring. Fortunately this lesson of labor the negro either 

 brought with him, or learned so well in the generations of slavery that 

 it is safely acquired. Next came the training in the occupations above 

 the plane of simple agriculture — the industries of the forge, the loom, 

 the ship and of military service and with it the habits of associated 

 action. Along with these came the development of the commercial 

 sense with the enlargements of view it gives, and from this the common 

 sense of public affairs that makes a democracy possible. We assumed 

 all this race training in the African when we cast him the ballot. Now 

 that he has failed to profit by our folly, we begin to doubt whether 

 there is, after all, the making of a citizen in him. A reasonable view 

 of the facts leads us to conclude that he can be made a valuable citizen, 

 provided he has a fair share of real help in the task of becoming such. 



The first need of the negro is the conviction that his salvation 

 depends upon himself. So long as he is deluded by the hope that some 

 great external power is to lift him to the social and economic level of 

 the whites, there is no chance that he will come to depend on himself 

 for advancement. From this point of view, at least, it is advantageous 

 that the attention of this country is for the time turned^away from them 

 in a search for other, and less practicable endeavors, to lift lowly 

 peoples to the Saxon's estate. The next is that the negroes be as 

 rapidly as possible employed in varied craft work — work in which they 

 may receive a larger training than the toil the fields afford. The 

 simple yet valuable lessons of the soil-tiller they have had. For the 

 greater number of their race, particularly those of the Guinea type, 

 this grade of employment is as high as they may be expected to attain. 

 Yet somewhere near one-third of the people of their color are fit for em- 



