poor prophets. The Negro, too,
believed that if he could only learn to read and write, and
especially if he could go to college, that he would be relieved of
every incumbrance that beset him. Education was looked upon as an end
and not as an agency. As his friends were destined to disappointment,
the Negro himself was doomed to humiliation and chagrin. Education
creates as many problems as it solves. It is both static and
dynamical. When Professor Straton says, therefore, that education has
not solved the race problem, he utters a truism. But if he means to
imply that it has not had a wholesome effect upon the life of the
Negro, his conclusion verges upon the absurd.

We are apt to be misled by the statistics showing the decline of
illiteracy among Negroes. All those who can read and write are set
apart as educated persons, as if this mere mechanical information had
worked some great transformation in their nature. The fact, is a very
small per cent of the race is educated in any practical or efficient
sense. The simple ability to read and write is of the least possible
benefit to a backward race. What advantage would it be to the red
Indians to be able to trace the letters of the English alphabet with a
pen, or to vocalize the printed characters into syllables and
sentences? Unless the moral nature is touched and the vital energies
aroused there would be no improvement in conduct or increase in
practical efficiency. Education has a larger function for a backward
than for a forward race. To the latter it merely furnishes a key to an
existing lock, while to the former it must supply both lock and key.
The pupil who is already acquainted with the nature and conditions of
a problem may need only a suggestion as to a skillful or lucky
combination of parts in order to lead to its solution; whereas to one
ignorant of the underlying facts and factors such suggestion would be
worse than useless.

Even much of the so-called higher education of the Negro has been only
a process of artificially forcing a mass of refined information into a
system which had no digestive or assimilative apparatus. Such
education produces no more nourishment or growth than would result
from forcing sweetmeats down the throat of an alligator. Of education
in its true sense the Negro has had very little. The great defect of
the Negro's nature is his lack of individual initiative, growing out
of his feeble energy of will. To overcome this difficulty,