y may dull the ambition
and 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 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, 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. The white teachers who flocked South went to
establish such a common school system. They had no idea of founding
colleges; they themselves 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. Then 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 chasm at the color line across which men pass at
their peril. Thus, then and no