ion.
Just the reverse was true. Moreover, it was not to be entrusted to
individuals operating on a small scale; it was to be a public effort
of larger scope. The aim was to make the education of Negroes so
articulate with their needs as to improve their economic condition.
Seeing that despite the successful endeavors of many freedmen to
acquire higher education that the race was still kept in penury,
Douglass believed that by reconstructing their educational policy the
friends of the race could teach the colored people to help themselves.
Pecuniary embarrassment, he thought, was the cause of all evil to
the blacks, "for poverty kept them ignorant and their lack of
enlightenment kept them degraded." The deliverance from these evils,
he contended, could be effected not by such a fancied or artificial
elevation as the mere diffusion of information by institutions beyond
the immediate needs of the poor. The awful plight of the Negroes, as
he saw it, resulted directly from not having the opportunity to learn
trades, and from "narrowing their limits to earn a livelihood."
Douglass deplored the fact that even menial employments were rapidly
passing away from the colored people. Under the caption of "Learn
Trades or Starve," he tried to drive home the truth that if the
free people of color did not soon heed his advice, foreigners then
immigrating in large numbers would elbow them from all lucrative
positions. In his own words, "every day begins with the lesson and
ends with the lesson that colored men must find new employments, new
modes of usefulness to society, or that they must decay under the
pressing wants to which their condition is bringing them."[1]

[Footnote 1: Douglass, _The Life and Times of_, p. 248.]

Douglass believed in higher education and looked forward to that stage
in the development of the Negroes when high schools and colleges could
contribute to their progress. He knew, however, that it was foolish
to think that persons accustomed to the rougher and harder modes of
living could in a single leap from their low condition reach that of
professional men. The attainment of such positions, he thought, was
contingent upon laying a foundation in things material by passing
"through the intermediate gradations of agriculture and the mechanic
arts."[1] He was sure that the higher institutions then open to the
colored people would be adequate to the task of providing for them all
the professional men they then need