What the race needs now is right leadership, and for many years to
come we are to equip men and women religiously and intellectually,
who, in home, in church, in social and business life, will be moral
and social leaders. And by this power of leadership I mean something
far other than those foolish conceits which have taken possession of a
few who have touched only the surface of the new life that is coming
to this people.

I have rather in mind leaders who shall have that moral and
intellectual fitness which produces reverence, earnestness and
humility, leaders who can draw their people away from their
foolishness, weakness and self-consciousness into the larger life that
is possible for them. Without a {97} doubt, what is needed is true
leaders, and I wish to show where these leaders are now demanded.

Before the war, the South knew nothing of the benefits of public
schools, and the private school was in harmony with its social and
political conceptions; but of late, and especially during the last
decade, a remarkable change has taken place which is doing as much to
affect the whole Southern problem as anything that has occurred there
during half a century. It is a movement in the South, which, however
imperfectly it has been developed as yet, has come to remain, and will
ultimately affect every institution, social, political and religious,
in our section of the country.

_It is now being recognized in every Southern State that free
government is based upon a public common-school system_. It has taken
two decades to incorporate this public school policy upon Southern
institutions, but it has now the evidence of permanency and it is
offering to Christian philanthropy an unparalleled opportunity, such