bitter because
the unattained ideal was unbounded save by the simple ignorance of a
lowly people.

The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for
freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,--like a
tantalizing will-o'-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless
host. The holocaust of war, the terrors of the Ku-Klux Klan, the lies
of carpet-baggers, the disorganization of industry, and the
contradictory advice of friends and foes, left the bewildered serf with
no new watchword beyond the old cry for freedom. As the time flew,
however, he began to grasp a new idea. The ideal of liberty demanded
for its attainment powerful means, and these the Fifteenth Amendment
gave him. The ballot, which before he had looked upon as a visible
sign of freedom, he now regarded 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
powerful 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
awa