congratulating you most heartily and sincerely upon the great success
of the exercises provided for and entertainment furnished us under your
auspices during our visit to Tuskegee. Every feature of the programme
was perfectly executed and was viewed or participated in with the
heartiest satisfaction by every visitor present. The unique exhibition
which you gave of your pupils engaged in their industrial vocations was
not only artistic but thoroughly impressive. The tribute paid by the
President and his Cabinet to your work was none too high, and forms
a most encouraging augury, I think, for the future prosperity of your
institution. I cannot close without assuring you that the modesty shown
by yourself in the exercises was most favourably commented upon by all
the members of our party.

With best wishes for the continued advance of your most useful and
patriotic undertaking, kind personal regards, and the compliments of the
season, believe me, always,

Very sincerely yours,

John Addison Porter,

Secretary to the President.

To President Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial
Institute, Tuskegee, Ala.

Twenty years have now passed since I made the first humble effort at
Tuskegee, in a broken-down shanty and an old hen-house, without owning
a dollar's worth of property, and with but one teacher and thirty
students. At the present time the institution owns twenty-three hundred
acres of land, one thousand of which are under cultivation each year,
entirely by student labour. There are now upon the grounds, counting
large and small, sixty-six buildings; and all except four of these have
been almost wholly erected by the labour of our students. While the
students are at work upon the land and in erecting buildings, they are
taught, by competent instructors, the latest methods of agriculture and
the trades connected with building.

There are in constant operation at the school, in connection with
thorough academic and religious training, thirty industrial departments.
All of these teach industries at which our men and women can find
immediate employment as soon as they leave the institution. The only
difficulty now is that the demand for our graduates from both white and
black people in the South is so great that we cannot supply more than
one-half the persons for whom applications come to us. Neither have we
the buildings nor the money for current expenses to enable us to admit
to the school more th