exercise or those whose souls and minds are stupefied
with manual toil? How is the drudgery of the world distributed, by
thoughtful justice or the lash of Slavery?

We cannot base the education of future citizens on the present
inexcusable inequality of wealth nor on physical differences of race. We
must seek not to make men carpenters but to make carpenters men.

Colored Americans must then with deep determination educate their
children in the broadest, highest way. They must fill the colleges with
the talented and fill the fields and shops with the intelligent. Wisdom
is the principal thing. Therefore, get wisdom.

But why am I talking simply of "colored" children? Is not the problem of
their education simply an intensification of the problem of educating
all children? Look at our plight in the United States, nearly 150 years
after the establishment of a government based on human intelligence.

If we take the figures of the Thirteenth Census, we find that there were
five and one-half million illiterate Americans of whom 3,184,633 were
white. Remembering that illiteracy is a crude and extreme test of
ignorance, we may assume that there are in the United States ten million
people over ten years of age who are too ignorant either to perform
their civic duties or to teach industrial efficiency. Moreover, it does
not seem that this illiteracy is disappearing rapidly.

For instance, nine percent of American children between ten and
nineteen years of age cannot read and write. Moreover, there are
millions of children who, judging by the figures for the school year
1909-10, are not going to learn to read and write, for of the Americans
six to fourteen years of age there were 3,125,392 who were not in school
a single day during that year. If we take the eleven million youths
fifteen to twenty years of age for whom vocational training is
particularly adapted, we find that nearly five per cent of these, or
448,414, are absolutely illiterate; it is not too much to assume that a
million of them have not acquired enough of the ordinary tools of
intelligence to make the most of efficient vocational training.

Confining ourselves to the white people, over fifteen per cent of the
white children six to fourteen years of age, or 2,253,198, did not
attend school during the school year 1909-10. Of the native white
children of native parents ten to fourteen years of age nearly a tenth
were not in school during that year; 121,878 nati