construction. Many
people, I think, fail to appreciate the difference between the problems
now before us and those that existed previous to the civil war. Slavery
presented a problem of destruction; freedom presents a problem of
construction.

From its first inception the white people of the South had faith in the
theory of industrial education, because they had noted, what was
not unnatural, that a large element of the colored people at first
interpreted freedom to mean freedom from work with the hands. They
naturally had not learned to appreciate the fact that they had been
WORKED, and that one of the great lessons for freemen to learn is to
WORK. They had not learned the vast difference between WORKING and BEING
WORKED. The white people saw in the movement to teach the Negro youth
the dignity, beauty, and civilizing power of all honorable labor with
the hands something that would lead the Negro into his new life of
freedom gradually and sensibly, and prevent his going from one extreme
of life to the other too suddenly. Furthermore, industrial education
appealed directly to the individual and community interest of the white
people. They saw at once that intelligence coupled with skill would add
wealth to the community and to the state, in which both races would have
an added share. Crude labor in the days of slavery, they believed, could
be handled and made in a degree profitable, but ignorant and unskilled
labor in a state of freedom could not be made so. Practically every
white man in the South was interested in agricultural or in mechanical
or in some form of manual labor; every white man was interested in
all that related to the home life,--the cooking and serving of food,
laundering, dairying, poultry-raising, and housekeeping in general.
There was no family whose interest in intelligent and skillful nursing
was not now and then quickened by the presence of a trained nurse. As
already stated, there was general appreciation of the fact that
the industrial education of the black people had direct, vital, and
practical bearing upon the life of each white family in the South; while
there was no such appreciation of the results of mere literary training.
If a black man became a lawyer, a doctor, a minister, or an ordinary
teacher, his professional duties would not ordinarily bring him in touch
with the life of the white portion of the community, but rather confine
him almost exclusively to his own race. While purely