whole community. It had to be done, moreover, without local help,
in the face of the direst poverty, done by begging, and done in
spite of the ignorance of one race and the prejudice of the
other.

No man living had a harder task, and a task that called for more
wisdom to do it right. The true measure of Mr. Washington's
success is, then, not his teaching the pupils of Tuskegee, nor
even gaining the support of philanthropic persons at a distance,
but this--that every Southern white man of character and of
wisdom has been won to a cordial recognition of the value of the
work, even men who held and still hold to the conviction that a
mere book education for the Southern blacks under present
conditions is a positive evil. This is a demonstration of the
efficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea that stands like the
demonstration of the value of democratic institutions
themselves--a demonstration made so clear in spite of the
greatest odds that it is no longer open to argument.

Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the
discussion of the Negro problem. Two or three decades ago social
philosophers and statisticians and well-meaning philanthropists
were still talking and writing about the deportation of the
Negroes, or about their settlement within some restricted area,
or about their settling in all parts of the Union, or about their
decline through their neglect of their children, or about their
rapid multiplication till they should expel the whites from the
South--of every sort of nonsense under heaven. All this has given
place to the simple plan of an indefinite extension among the
neglected classes of both races of the Hampton-Tuskegee system of