t and drink and sleep;" for man cannot live without
these habits. But they never civilize man; and _civilization_ is the
objective point in the movement for Negro elevation. Labor, just like
eating and drinking, is one of the inevitabilities of life; one of its
positive necessities. And the Negro has had it for centuries; but it has
never given him manhood. It does not _now_, in wide areas of population,
lift him up to moral and social elevation. Hence the need of a new
factor in his life. The Negro needs light: light thrown in upon all the
circumstances of his life. The light of civilization.

Dr. Wayland fails to see two or three important things in this Negro
problem:--

(a) That the Negro has no need to go to a manual labor school.[4] He has
been for two hundred years and more, the greatest laborer in the land.
He is a laborer _now_; and he must always be a laborer, or he must die.
But:

(b) Unfortunately for the Negro, he has been so wretchedly ignorant that
he has never known the value of his sweat and toil. He has been forced
into being an unthinking labor-machine. And this he is, to a large
degree, to-day under freedom.

(c) Now the great need of the Negro, in our day and time, is intelligent
impatience at the exploitation of his labor, on the one hand; on the
other hand courage to demand a larger share of the wealth which his toil
creates for others.

It is not a mere negative proposition that settles this question. It is
not that the Negro does not need the hoe, the plane, the plough, and the
anvil. It is the positive affirmation that the Negro needs the light of
cultivation; needs it to be thrown in upon all his toil, upon his whole
life and its environments.

What he needs is CIVILIZATION. He needs the increase of his higher wants,
of his mental and spiritual needs. _This_, mere animal labor has never
given him, and never can give him. But it will come to him, as an
individual, and as a class, just in proportion as the higher culture
comes to his leaders and teachers, and so gets into his schools, academies
and colleges; and then enters his pulpits; and so filters down into his
families and his homes; and the Negro learns that he is no longer to be a
serf, but that he is to bare his strong brawny arm as a laborer; _not_ to
make the white man a Croesus, but to make himself a man. He is always to
be a laborer; but now, in these days of freedom and the schools, he is to
be a laborer with intelligence, en