ant the
abandonment of all political privileges, and the higher or classical
education of the race. They feared that the final outcome would be the
materialization of the Negro, and the smothering of his spiritual and
aesthetic nature. Others felt that industrial education had for its
object the limitation of the Negro's development, and the branding him
for all time as a special hand-working class.

Now that enough time has elapsed for those who opposed it to see that
it meant none of these things, opposition, except from a very few of
the colored people living in Boston and Washington, has ceased, and this
system has the enthusiastic support of the Negroes and of most of the
whites who formerly opposed it. All are beginning to see that it was
never meant that ALL Negro youths should secure industrial education,
any more than it is meant that ALL white youths should pass through
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or the Amherst Agricultural
College, to the exclusion of such training as is given at Harvard, Yale,
or Dartmouth; but that in a peculiar sense a large proportion of the
Negro youths needed to have that education which would enable them to
secure an economic foundation, without which no people can succeed in
any of the higher walks of life.

It is because of the fact that the Tuskegee Institute began at the
bottom, with work in the soil, in wood, in iron, in leather, that it
has now developed to the point where it is able to furnish employment
as teachers to twenty-eight Negro graduates of the best colleges in the
country. This is about three times as many Negro college graduates as
any other institution in the United States for the education of colored
people employs, the total number of officers and instructors at Tuskegee
being about one hundred and ten.

Those who once opposed this see now that while the Negro youth who
becomes skilled in agriculture and a successful farmer may not be able
himself to pass through a purely literary college, he is laying the
foundation for his children and grandchildren to do it if desirable.
Industrial education in this generation is contributing in the highest
degree to make what is called higher education a success. It is now
realized that in so far as the race has intelligent and skillful
producers, the greater will be the success of the minister, lawyer,
doctor, and teacher. Opposition has melted away, too, because all men
now see that it will take a long tim