d
bad, of physical strength, kindly temper, crude morals and childish
ignorance. For a time the officials of the Bureau, as best they could,
kept order, found work, settled quarrels, and promoted schools. But what
was to be the large outcome?

Armstrong had been known to his associates as a man of splendid and
many-sided vitality. A college classmate, Dr. John Denison, graphically
describes him, "A sort of cataclysm of health, like other cyclones from
the South seas"; what the Tennessee mountaineers call "plumb
survigrous"; an islander, with the high courage and jollity of the tar;
"a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness." Extraordinary in
his training and versatility; able to "manage a boat in a storm, teach a
school, edit a newspaper, assist in carrying on a government, take up a
mechanical industry at will, understand the natives, sympathize with the
missionaries, talk with profound theorists, recite well in Greek or
mathematics, conduct an advanced class in geometry, and make no end of
fun for little children." He had had the training of a missionary
station in a Robinson Crusoe-like variety of functions. A knight-errant
to the core, the atmosphere of Williams under Hopkins gave him his
consecration. His comrades recognized him as an intellectual leader,
essentially religious but often startlingly unconventional, "under
great terrestrial headway," "the most strenuous man I ever saw." He said
of himself: "missionary or pirate."

Now after the sobering of three years of campaigning his immediate
duties brought him face to face with the tremendous problem of the
negro, and the elements of the solution already lay in his own
character, experience, personality.

What were the assets of the negro? He had, by inheritance and training,
the capacity and instinct of labor. What an advantage that is appears by
the contrast with the Indian, who is perishing for want of just that.
But the negro knew labor only as the hard necessity of his lot,--it had
to him no higher significance. "Education," was the watchword of the
generous spirits of another race who were coming to his help. They found
at first great promise in the freedman's eagerness to learn reading and
writing. But it soon appeared that this was an outreaching toward some
vague social advantage, and that the actual acquisition through speller
and copybook carried him and his children but a little way up. It was a
pressing necessity to provide teachers, a