universities of the land. We will not quarrel as to just what the
university of the Negro should teach or how it should teach it--I
willingly admit that each soul and each race-soul needs its own peculiar
curriculum. But this is true: A university is a human invention for the
transmission of knowledge and culture from generation to generation,
through the training of quick minds and pure hearts, and for this work no
other human invention will suffice, not even trade and industrial schools.

All men cannot go to college but some men must; every isolated group or
nation must have its yeast, must have for the talented few centers of
training where men are not so mystified and befuddled by the hard and
necessary toil of earning a living, as to have no aims higher than their
bellies, and no God greater than Gold. This is true training, and thus in
the beginning were the favored sons of the freedmen trained. Out of the
colleges of the North came, after the blood of war, Ware, Cravath, Chase,
Andrews, Bumstead and Spence to build the foundations of knowledge and
civilization in the black South. Where ought they to have begun to build?
At the bottom, of course, quibbles the mole with his eyes in the earth.
Aye! truly at the bottom, at the very bottom; at the bottom of knowledge,
down in the very depths of knowledge there where the roots of justice
strike into the lowest soil of Truth. And so they did begin; they founded
colleges, and up from the colleges shot normal schools, and out from the
normal schools went teachers, and around the normal teachers clustered
other teachers to teach the public schools; the college trained in Greek
and Latin and mathematics, 2,000 men; and these men trained full 50,000
others in morals and manners, and they in turn taught thrift and the
alphabet to nine millions of men, who to-day hold $300,000,000 of
property. It was a miracle--the most wonderful peace-battle of the 19th
century, and yet to-day men smile at it, and in fine superiority tell us
that it was all a strange mistake; that a proper way to found a system of