CHAPTER II.

In order that the reader may understand me and why I lay so much
stress upon the importance of pushing the doctrine of industrial
education for the Negro, it is necessary, first of all, to review the
condition of affairs at the present time in the Southern States. For
years I have had something of an opportunity to study the Negro at
first-hand; and I feel that I know him pretty well,--him and his
needs, his failures and his successes, his desires and the likelihood
of their fulfilment. I have studied him and his relations with his
white neighbours, and striven to find how these relations may be made
more conducive to the general peace and welfare both of the South and
of the country at large.

In the Southern part of the United States there are twenty-two
millions of people who are bound to the fifty millions of the North by
ties which neither can tear asunder if they would. The most
intelligent in a New York community has his intelligence darkened by
the ignorance of a fellow-citizen in the Mississippi bottoms. The most
wealthy in New York City would be more wealthy but for the poverty of
a fellow-being in the Carolina rice swamps. The most moral and
religious men in Massachusetts have their religion and morality
modified by the degradation of the man in the South whose religion is
a mere matter of form or of emotionalism. The vote of the man in Maine
that is cast for the highest and purest form of government is largely
neutralised by the vote of the man in Louisiana whose ballot is stolen
or cast in ignorance. Therefore, when the South is ignorant, the North
is ignorant; when the South is poor, the North is poor; when the South
commits crime, the nation commits crime. For the citizens of the North
there is no escape; they must help raise the character of the
civilisation in the South, or theirs will be lowered. No member of the
white race in any part of the country can harm the weakest or meanest
member of the black race without the proudest and bluest blood of the
nation being degraded.

It seems to me that there never was a time in the history of the
country when those interested in education should the more earnestly
consider to what extent the mere acquiring of the ability to read and
write, the mere acquisition of a knowledge of literature and science,
makes men producers, lovers of labour, independent, honest, unselfish,
and, above all, good. Call education by what name you please, if it
fai