lation into more
languages, I think, than any other American book; and I suppose that
he has as large a personal acquaintance among men of influence as any
private citizen now living.

His own teaching at Tuskegee is unique. He lectures to his advanced
students on the art of right living, not out of text-books, but
straight out of life. Then he sends them into the country to visit Negro
families. Such a student will come back with a minute report of the way
in which the family that he has seen lives, what their earnings are,
what they do well and what they do ill; and he will explain how they
might live better. He constructs a definite plan for the betterment
of that particular family out of the resources that they have. Such a
student, if he be bright, will profit more by an experience like this
than he could profit by all the books on sociology and economics that
ever were written. I talked with a boy at Tuskegee who had made such a
study as this, and I could not keep from contrasting his knowledge and
enthusiasm with what I heard in a class room at a Negro university
in one of the Southern cities, which is conducted on the idea that a
college course will save the soul. Here the class was reciting a lesson
from an abstruse text-book on economics, reciting it by rote, with so
obvious a failure to assimilate it that the waste of labour was pitiful.

I asked Mr. Washington years ago what he regarded as the most important
result of his work, and he replied:

"I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee's work on the
Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man to the Negro."

The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast getting
wider. Under the influence of the Hampton-Tuskegee idea the races
are coming into a closer sympathy and into an honourable and helpful
relation. As the Negro becomes economically independent, he becomes a
responsible part of the Southern life; and the whites so recognize
him. And this must be so from the nature of things. There is nothing
artificial about it. It is development in a perfectly natural way. And
the Southern whites not only so recognize it, but they are imitating it
in the teaching of the neglected masses of their own race. It has thus
come about that the school is taking a more direct and helpful hold on
life in the South than anywhere else in the country. Education is not
a thing apart from life--not a "system," nor a philosophy; it is direct