since for a Royal Commission to study the technical schools
of the continent, and the report respecting France made by
this commission has been republished at Washington by the
United States Commissioner of Education. In our two leading
northwestern cities, St. Louis and Chicago, splendid manual
training-schools have been formed, and east and west the
question of elementary manual training in public schools is
up for discussion and decision. All this for _white_
laboring men. As long ago as December, 1879, the Legislature
of Tennessee authorized a brief manual of the Elementary
Principles of Agriculture to be "taught in the public
schools of the State," for the benefit of _white_ farmers
again. The Professor of Chemistry in the Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, prepared the book--107 pages. Where
in all this is there anything for the educational
improvement of the black laborer just where he needs
education most? The labor of the South is subject in these
years to a marvelous revolution. The only opportunity the
freedman has to rise is by furnishing such skilled labor as
the great changes going on in that splendid section of the
land require. How can he furnish it, unless the education
given him is chiefly industrial and technical? Some very
pertinent statements of the situation are made in the
_Princeton Review_ for May. They confirm all that you have
said.[12] As to the various bills before Congress, the
writer says: "Immediate assistance should be rendered to the
ex-slave States in the development of an education suited to
their political and _industrial_ needs." Can this be an
education in Latin and Greek?"(The writer contends earnestly
for retaining these studies in classical college and academy