teaching the pupils of Tuskegee, nor even gaining the support of
philanthropic persons at a distance, but this--that every Southern white
man of character and of wisdom has been won to a cordial recognition
of the value of the work, even men who held and still hold to the
conviction that a mere book education for the Southern blacks under
present conditions is a positive evil. This is a demonstration of
the efficiency of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea that stands like the
demonstration of the value of democratic institutions themselves--a
demonstration made so clear in spite of the greatest odds that it is no
longer open to argument.

Consider the change that has come in twenty years in the discussion
of the Negro problem. Two or three decades ago social philosophers and
statisticians and well-meaning philanthropists were still talking and
writing about the deportation of the Negroes, or about their settlement
within some restricted area, or about their settling in all parts of the
Union, or about their decline through their neglect of their children,
or about their rapid multiplication till they should expel the whites
from the South--of every sort of nonsense under heaven. All this has
given place to the simple plan of an indefinite extension among the
neglected classes of both races of the Hampton-Tuskegee system of
training. The "problem" in one sense has disappeared. The future will
have for the South swift or slow development of its masses and of its
soil in proportion to the swift or slow development of this kind of
training. This change of view is a true measure of Mr. Washington's
work.

The literature of the Negro in America is colossal, from political
oratory through abolitionism to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "Cotton is
King"--a vast mass of books which many men have read to the waste of
good years (and I among them); but the only books that I have read a
second time or ever care again to read in the whole list (most of them
by tiresome and unbalanced "reformers") are "Uncle Remus" and "Up from
Slavery"; for these are the great literature of the subject. One has all
the best of the past, the other foreshadows a better future; and the
men who wrote them are the only men who have written of the subject with
that perfect frankness and perfect knowledge and perfect poise whose
other name is genius.

Mr. Washington has won a world-wide fame at an early age. His story
of his own life already has the distinction of trans