ed men.

But when we have vaguely said Education will set 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? Two hundred years ago our task would have seemed easier. Then
Dr. Johnson blandly assured us that education was needed 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 truth 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 cooperation. 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
prejudice 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