seen lives, what their earnings are, what they do well and what
they do ill; and he will explain how they might live better. He
constructs a definite plan for the betterment of that particular
family out of the resources that they have. Such a student, if he
be bright, will profit more by an experience like this than he
could profit by all the books on sociology and economics that
ever were written. I talked with a boy at Tuskegee who had made
such a study as this, and I could not keep from contrasting his
knowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class room at a
Negro university in one of the Southern cities, which is
conducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul.
Here the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book
on economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to
assimilate it that the waste of labour was pitiful.

I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the most
important result of his work, and he replied:

"I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee's work
on the Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man to
the Negro."

The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast
getting wider. Under the influence of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea
the races are coming into a closer sympathy and into an
honourable and helpful relation. As the Negro becomes
economically independent, he becomes a responsible part of the
Southern life; and the whites so recognize him. And this must be
so from the nature of things. There is nothing artificial about
it. It is development in a perfectly natural way. And the