this tangle
straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches
living; but what training for the profitable living together of black
men and white? A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have
seemed easier. Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured us that education was
needful solely for the embellishments of life, and was useless for
ordinary vermin. To-day we have climbed to heights where we would open
at least the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures to
many, and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not
wholly by birth or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in
part according to deftness and aim, talent and character. This
programme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that
part of the land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we
are dealing with two backward peoples. To make here in human education
that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent--of
the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium--has been there, as
it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment
and frequent mistakes.

In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work in
Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of the war
until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief.
There were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen's
Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking system and co-operation. Then
followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building
of complete school systems in the South. Normal schools and colleges
were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the
public schools. There was the inevitable tendency of war to
underestimate the prejudices of the master and the ignorance of the
slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm.
Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885
to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The land saw
glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The
educational system striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a
field of work ever broader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly
founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of
varying efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing
little more than common-school work, and the common schoo