nearly at the point where New England education had ended. Let me
illustrate. One of the saddest sights I ever saw was the placing of a
three hundred dollar rosewood piano in a country school in the South
that was located in the midst of the "Black Belt." Am I arguing
against the teaching of instrumental music to the Negroes in that
community? Not at all; only I should have deferred those music lessons
about twenty-five years. There are numbers of such pianos in thousands
of New England homes. But behind the piano in the New England home
there are one hundred years of toil, sacrifice, and economy; there is
the small manufacturing industry, started several years ago by hand
power, now grown into a great business; there is ownership in land, a
comfortable home, free from debt, and a bank account. In this "Black
Belt" community where this piano went, four-fifths of the people owned
no land, many lived in rented one-room cabins, many were in debt for
food supplies, many mortgaged their crops for the food on which to
live, and not one had a bank account. In this case, how much wiser it
would have been to have taught the girls in this community sewing,
intelligent and economical cooking, housekeeping, something of
dairying and horticulture? The boys should have been taught something
of farming in connection with their common-school education, instead
of awakening in them a desire for a musical instrument which resulted
in their parents going into debt for a third-rate piano or organ
before a home was purchased. Industrial lessons would have awakened,
in this community, a desire for homes, and would have given the people
the ability to free themselves from industrial slavery to the extent
that most of them would have soon purchased homes. After the home and
the necessaries of life were supplied could come the piano. One piano
lesson in a home of one's own is worth twenty in a rented log cabin.

All that I have just written, and the various examples illustrating
it, show the present helpless condition of my people in the
South,--how fearfully they lack the primary training for good living
and good citizenship, how much they stand in need of a solid
foundation on which to build their future success. I believe, as I
have many times said in my various addresses in the North and in the
South, that the main reason for the existence of this curious state
of affairs is the lack of practical training in the ways of life.

There is, t