in regard to a candidate for a professorship or instructorship,
is not whether he was born North or South, whether he served in one army
or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or a
Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to, but is he a scholar
and has he a high character? There is no provincialism in scholarship.

We are not now considering the matter of the agreeableness of one society
or another, whether life is on the whole pleasanter in certain conditions
at the North or at the South, whether there is not a charm sometimes in
isolation and even in provincialism. It is a fair question to ask, what
effect upon individual lives and character is produced by an industrial
and commercial spirit, and by one less restless and more domestic. But
the South is now face to face with certain problems which relate her,
inevitably, to the moving forces of the world. One of these is the
development of her natural resources and the change and diversity of her
industries. On the industrial side there is pressing need of institutions
of technology, of schools of applied science, for the diffusion of
technical information and skill in regard to mining and manufacturing,
and also to agriculture, so that worn-out lands may be reclaimed and good
lands be kept up to the highest point of production. Neither mines,
forests, quarries, water-ways, nor textile fabrics can be handled to best
advantage without scientific knowledge and skilled labor. The South is
everywhere demanding these aids to her industrial development. But just
in the proportion that she gets them, and because she has them, will be
the need of higher education. The only safety against the influence of a
rolling mill is a college, the only safety against the practical and
materializing tendency of an industrial school is the increased study of
whatever contributes to the higher and non-sordid life of the mind. The
South would make a poor exchange for her former condition in any amount
of industrial success without a corresponding development of the highest
intellectual life.

But, besides the industrial problem, there is the race problem. It is the
most serious in the conditions under which it is presented that ever in
all history confronted a free people. Whichever way you regard it, it is
the nearest insoluble. Under the Constitution it is wisely left to the
action of the individual States. The heavy responsibility is with them.
In the n