esolve or more unfettered striving; the
determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest
possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with
their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice,--all this is the burden of
their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and
proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a
deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and
the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and
breezes of Parnassus; and here men may lie and listen, and learn of a
future fuller than the past, and hear the voice of Time:

"Entbehren sollst du, sollst entbehren."

They made their mistakes, those who planted Fisk and Howard and Atlanta
before the smoke of battle had lifted; they made their mistakes, but
those mistakes were not the things at which we lately laughed somewhat
uproariously. They were right when they sought to found a new
educational system upon the University: where, forsooth, shall we
ground knowledge save on the broadest and deepest knowledge? The roots
of the tree, rather than the leaves, are the sources of its life; and
from the dawn of history, from Academus to Cambridge, the culture of
the University has been the broad foundation-stone on which is built
the kindergarten's A B C.

But these builders did make a mistake in minimizing the gravity of the
problem before them; in thinking it a matter of years and decades; in
therefore building quickly and laying their foundation carelessly, and
lowering the standard of knowing, until they had scattered haphazard
through the South some dozen poorly equipped high schools and miscalled
them universities. They forgot, too, just as their successors are
forgetting, the rule of inequality:--that of the million black youth,
some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some had the talent and
capacity of university men, and some the talent and capacity of
blacksmiths; and that true training meant neither that all should be
college men nor all artisans, but that the one should be made a
missionary of culture to an untaught people, and the other a free
workman among serfs. And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is
almost as silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a
blacksmith; almost, but not quite.

The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-winning, or
to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be