ies may
be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white
neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise
method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the
great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this
the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are working
to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations of
knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college
and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure. Internal
problems of social advance must inevitably come,--problems of work and
wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing of
the things of life; and all these and other inevitable problems of
civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself, by
reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible solution other
than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the
past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely
more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow
thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have
wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer
successfully between the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardly induce
black men to believe that if their bellies be full it matters little
about their brains. They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace
winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance
of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black
lowly and black men emancipated by training and culture.

The function of the Negro college then is clear: it must maintain the
standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of
the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact
and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men.
Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must
persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of
culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign
human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks
a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate
and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new. Such souls
aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly
bewitched by our Rhine-gold,