EDUCATION OF OUR COLORED CITIZENS. 791 



character by eliminating the idea of moral responsibility. No 

 soul, no sin. If the marriage tie may be broken at the will of 

 the master, assuredly it will be at the pleasure of the slave. If 

 the servant is a chattel, there is force in his logic that in convert- 

 ing chicken into slave, he is only changing the form of property. 

 The virtues of the slave are unquestioning obedience and passive 

 resignation. The fundamental virtues of the freeman are self- 

 assertion and active, unflinching resistance to any attack on his 

 rights. 



The close of the war saw millions of slaves suddenly enfran- 

 chised. How were they to be safely translated from one con- 

 dition to another, to enjoy liberty without running into license, 

 to defend themselves without offending others — in a word, to be- 

 come good citizens ? To the great good fortune of the negro the 

 contraband camp at Hampton, Va., was placed under the control 

 of General Samuel C. Armstrong — a man fitted for his position, 

 not only by having served in the war as a leader of black troops, 

 but by having passed his boyhood as the son of a missionary in 

 the Hawaiian Islands. Through this early training he had an 

 opportunity of studying close at hand the evolution from bar- 

 barism of a dark-skinned Polynesian people strongly resembling 

 in many ways the negro in America. 



Describing his early experiences, he wrote, years afterward : 

 "On horseback and in canoe tours with my father and alone 

 around those grandly picturesque volcanic islands, inspecting 

 schools and living much among the natives (then generally Chris- 

 tianized), I noticed how easily the children learned from books, 

 how universally the people attended church and had family 

 prayers — always charmingly hospitable ; and yet that they lived 

 pretty much in the old ways, all in one room, including the stran- 

 ger within their gates, who usually had, however, the benefit of 

 the raised end and a curtain. They seemed to have accepted, but 

 not to have fully adopted, Christianity ; for they did not have 

 the conditions of living which make high standards of morality 

 possible." 



While heartily in sympathy with the effort to Christianize 

 these people, he was forced to see and deplore the process of pie- 

 tizing without moralizing, which was repeated later under his eye 

 in the camp-meetings of the South. No heathen is so difficult to 

 deal with, as the negro who has run through the whole gamut of 

 religious experience and still retains his original weakness for pil- 

 fering watermelons. 



General Armstrong's scientific study of the negro led him 

 early to the belief that the only hope for the black lay, not in being 

 helped, but in being taught to help himself; not in being pauper- 

 ized, but in being civilized. He made up his mind that any sys- 



