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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



tern of training, to be successful, must "be symmetrical, and must 

 take into account the equal development of heart, hand, and head. 

 It was to work out this theory that he consented to take charge 

 of the school for freedmen which was gradually evolved from 

 the camp at Hampton. Here, on the spot rich in historical memo- 

 ries, where freedom first came to the slave through Benjamin F. 

 Butler's famous order declaring him contraband of war, on the 

 shores of the broad bay where the Monitor and the Merrimac 

 closed in their deadly embrace, General Armstrong opened his 

 educational campaign. It was not the first time he had thought 

 of such a scheme. 



"A day-dream of the Hampton School nearly as it is," he says, 

 " had come to me during the war a few times ; once in camp dur- 

 ing the siege of Richmond, and once one beautiful evening on the 

 Gulf of Mexico, while on the wheel-house of the transfer steam- 

 ship Illinois, en route for Texas, with the Twenty-fifth Army 

 (negro) Corps for frontier duty on the Rio Grande River, whither 

 it had been ordered, under General Sheridan, to watch and if 

 necessary defeat Maximilian in his attempted conquest of Mexico. 



" The thing to be done was clear : to train selected negro youth 

 who should go out and teach and lead their people, first by ex- 

 ample, by getting land and homes ; to give them not a dollar that 

 they could earn for themselves ; to teach respect for labor ; to re- 

 place stupid drudgery with skilled hands ; and, to these ends, to 

 build up an industrial system, for the sake not only of self-sup- 

 port and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character. And 

 it seemed equally clear that the people of the country would sup- 

 port a wise work for the freedmen." 



Time has more than justified his foresight. It has proved his 

 plan not alone a wise way, but the only way out of the difficulty. 

 This is the answer to the question, What kind of education is best 

 for the negroes ? First, such an industrial training as shall make 

 them masters of their own faculties ; then an economic training 

 teaching them how to save and how to spend money ; and after- 

 ward as high an intellectual education as they shall show ca- 

 pacity and desire for. That will take care of itself. The first 

 essential in making the blacks independent is to make them 

 home-owners and property-holders. This is not a difficult task, 

 for the negroes have a land hunger. The difficulty lies in their 

 improvident habits, which too often result in mortgaged houses 

 and farms. 



The emancipation of the slaves in America threatened to fol- 

 low the same course as the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, 

 where the boons of liberty turned to a calamity and a curse. 

 Slavery, under masters made often considerate by habit, was ex- 

 changed for an industrial slavery far more bitter. The emanci- 



