eader does not get his
intellectual pedigree, for Mr. Washington himself, perhaps, does not
as clearly understand it as another man might. The truth is he had a
training during the most impressionable period of his life that was very
extraordinary, such a training as few men of his generation have had.
To see its full meaning one must start in the Hawaiian Islands half
a century or more ago.* There Samuel Armstrong, a youth of missionary
parents, earned enough money to pay his expenses at an American college.
Equipped with this small sum and the earnestness that the undertaking
implied, he came to Williams College when Dr. Mark Hopkins was
president. Williams College had many good things for youth in that day,
as it has in this, but the greatest was the strong personality of its
famous president. Every student does not profit by a great teacher; but
perhaps no young man ever came under the influence of Dr. Hopkins,
whose whole nature was so ripe for profit by such an experience as young
Armstrong. He lived in the family of President Hopkins, and thus had a
training that was wholly out of the common; and this training had
much to do with the development of his own strong character, whose
originality and force we are only beginning to appreciate.

* For this interesting view of Mr. Washington's education, I
am indebted to Robert C. Ogden, Esq., Chairman of the Board
of Trustees of Hampton Institute and the intimate friend of
General Armstrong during the whole period of his educational
work.

In turn, Samuel Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Institute, took up his
work as a trainer of youth. He had very raw material, and doubtless most
of his pupils failed to get the greatest lessons from him; but, as
he had been a peculiarly receptive pupil of Dr. Hopkins, so Booker
Washington became a peculiarly receptive pupil of his. To the formation
of Mr. Washington's character, then, went the missionary zeal of New
England, influenced by one of the strongest personalities in modern
education, and the wide-reaching moral earnestness of General Armstrong
himself These influences are easily recognizable in Mr. Washington
to-day by men who knew Dr. Hopkins and General Armstrong.

I got the cue to Mr. Washington's character from a very simple incident
many years ago. I had never seen him, and I knew little about him,
except that he was the head of a school at Tuskegee, Alabama. I had
occasion to write to him,