school
work, and the common schools were training but a third of the children
who ought to be in them, and training these too often poorly. At the
same time the white South, by reason of its sudden conversion from the
slavery ideal, by so much the more became set and strengthened in its
racial prejudice, and crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom;
while the marvelous pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened
to take even bread and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped
sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger problem of Negro
education sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable
economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery
to freedom, and especially those who make that change amid hate and
prejudice, lawlessness and ruthless competition.

The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to
full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered
answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer
of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all the
schools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but now
was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct
touch with the South's magnificent industrial development, and given an
emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple of Knowledge
swing the Gates of Toil.

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from
the temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader
question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in
America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material
advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is
the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and
to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever recurring query of the
ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And
men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister signs in
recent educational movements. The tendency is here born of slavery and
quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard
human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained
with an eye single to future dividends. Race prejudices, which keep
brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard as useful
allies with such a theory, no matter how much the