as the chief means of gaining and perfecting the liberty with
which war had partially endowed him. And why not? Had not
votes made war and emancipated millions? Had not votes
enfranchised the freedmen? Was anything impossible to a
power that had done all this? A million black men started
with renewed zeal to vote themselves into the kingdom. So
the decade flew away, the revolution of 1876 came, and left
the half-free serf weary, wondering, but still inspired. Slowly
but steadily, in the following years, a new vision began
gradually to replace the dream of political power,--a pow-
erful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided,
another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the
ideal of "book-learning"; the curiosity, born of compulsory
ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabalistic letters
of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to
have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan; longer
than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged,
but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.

Up the new path the advance guard toiled, slowly, heavily,
doggedly; only those who have watched and guided the faltering
feet, the misty minds, the dull understandings, of the dark
pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously,
this people strove to learn. It was weary work. The cold
statistician wrote down the inches of progress here and there,
noted also where here and there a foot had slipped or some
one had fallen. To the tired climbers, the horizon was ever
dark, the mists were often cold, the Canaan was always dim
and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal,
no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey