n, even if forced by fraud; a
shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet
sure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and
afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men
for life.

Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante,
lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and
awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and
wild we have within our threshold;--a stalwart laboring force, suited to
the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to
use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other
hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught
in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as
in the past, what shall save us from national decadence? Only that saner
selfishness which, Education teaches men, can find the rights of all in
the whirl of work.

Again, we may decry the color prejudice of the South, yet it remains
a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must
be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always
successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature.
And yet they cannot be encouraged by being let alone. They must be
recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way
of civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met in but
one way: by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity
of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration
of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not
lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is
to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome
a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The
guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the path
of honor and humanity.

And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially
contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Education leaps to
the lips of all; such human training as will best use the labor of all
men without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us
poise to encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and stamp out
those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls
within the Veil, and the mounting fury of shackl