nal effort
among the colored people thus far has been to purify their perverted
moral nature and to indoctrinate in them correcter ideas of religion
and its obligations; and the effort has not been in vain. Yet I am
constrained to say, the inculcation of these principals has been
altogether a too predominant idea. Material possibilities are rightly
predicated upon correct moral and spiritual bases; but a morally and
spiritually sound training must be sustained by such preparation for
the actual work of life, as we find it in the machine shop, the grain
field, and the commercial pursuits. The moralist and missionary are no
equals for the man whose ideas of honest toil are supplemented by a
common school training and an educated hand. This is exemplified every
day in the ready demand for foreign-born skilled labor over our own
people, usually educated as gentlemen without means, as if they were
to be kid-gloved fellows, not men who must contend for subsistence
with the horny-handed men who have graduated from the machine shops
and factories and the schools of applied sciences of Europe. Indeed,
the absence of the old-time apprentices among the white youth of the
North, as a force in our industrial organization to draw upon, can be
accounted for upon no other ground than that the supply of
foreign-born skilled help so readily fills the demand that employers
find it a useless expenditure of means to graduate the American boy.
Thus may we account for the "grand rush" young men make for the
lighter employments and the professions, creating year after year an
idle floating population of miseducated men, and reducing the
compensation for clerical work below that received by hod-carriers.
This is not a fancy picture; it is an arraignment of the American
system of education, which proceeds upon the assumption that boys are
all "born with a silver spoon in their mouths" and are destined to
reach--not the poor-house, but the Senate House or the White House.

The American system of education proceeds upon a false and pernicious
assumption; and, while I protest against its application generally, I
protest, in this connection, against its application in the case of
the colored youth in particular. What the colored boy, what all boys
of the country need, is _industrial not ornamental_ education; shall
they have it? Let the State and the philanthropists answer.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Judge Tourgee has for years been urgently and admirab