nd sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above
all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that
sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character
rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger
and delusion of black.

Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational
efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, we
find first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the
preparation of teachers for a vast public-school system; then the
launching and expansion of that school system amid increasing
difficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the new and
growing industries. This development has been sharply ridiculed as a
logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have been told
that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro
to work, then simple schools should have taught him to read and write,
and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have completed
the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.

That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it
needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs is more
often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and
the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his
vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident that gave birth to
universities centuries before the common schools, that made fair
Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. So in the South: the mass
of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so
necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the common school
to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have higher
schools to teach teachers for the common schools. The white teachers
who flocked South went to establish such a common-school system. Few
held the idea of founding colleges; most of them at first would have
laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since them have faced,
that central paradox of the South,--the social separation of the races.
At that time it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all relations
between black and white, in work and government and family life. Since
then a new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs
has grown up,--an adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet
singularly ingenious, which leaves still that frightful