race as a whole.
It would, however, be to small purpose if we did not ask what can be done
to develop the innate good and correct the bad in a race so puissant and
numerous? This mass is not inert; it has great reactionary force,
modifying and influencing all about it. The Negro's excellences have
entered into American character and life already; so have his weaknesses.
He has brought cheer, love, emotion and religion in saving measure to the
land. He has given it wealth by his brawn and liberty by his blood. His
self-respect, even in abasement, has kept him struggling upward; his
confidence in his own future has infected his friends and kept him from
nursing despondency or planning anarchy. But he has laid, and does lay,
burdens upon the land, too: his ignorance, his low average of morality,
his low standards of home, his lack of enterprise, his lack of
self-reliance--these must be cured.

Evidently, he is to be "solved" by educational processes. Everyone of his
inborn traits must be respected and developed to proper proportion.
Excesses and excrescences must not be carelessly dealt with, for they mark
the fertility of a soil that raises rank weeds because no gardener has
tilled it. His religion must become "ethics touched with feeling"--not a
paroxysm, but a principle. His imagination must be given a rudder to guide
its sails; and the first fruits of its proper exercise, as seen in a
Dunbar, a Chesnutt, a Coleridge-Taylor and a Tanner, must be pedestaled
along the Appian Way over which others are to march. His affection must be
met with larger love; his patience rewarded with privilege; his courage
called to defend the rights of others rather than redress his own wrongs.
Thus shall he supplement from within the best efforts of good men without.

To cure the evils entailed upon him by an unhappy past, he must be
educated to work with skill, with self-direction, in combination and
unremittingly. Industrial education with constant application, is the
slogan of his rise from racial pauperism to productive manliness. Not that
exceptional minds should not have exceptional opportunities (and they
already exist); but that the great majority of awkward and unskilled ones,
who must work somehow, somewhere, all the time, shall have their
opportunities for training in industrial schools near them and with
courses consonant with the lives they are to lead. Let the ninety and nine
who must work, either with trained or fumbling han