ho were constantly being
trained, not alone as common farmers, but as carpenters, blacksmiths,
wheelwrights, plasterers, brick masons, engineers, bridge-builders,
cooks, dressmakers, housekeepers, etc. I would be the last to
apologise for the curse of slavery; but I am simply stating facts.
This training was crude and was given for selfish purposes, and did
not answer the highest ends, because there was the absence of brain
training in connection with that of the hand. Nevertheless, this
business contact with the Southern white man, and the industrial
training received on these plantations, put the Negro at the close of
the war into possession of all the common and skilled labour in the
South. For nearly twenty years after the war, except in one or two
cases, the value of the industrial training given by the Negroes'
former masters on the plantations and elsewhere was overlooked. Negro
men and women were educated in literature, mathematics, and the
sciences, with no thought of what had taken place on these plantations
for two and a half centuries. After twenty years, those who were
trained as mechanics, etc., during slavery began to disappear by
death; and gradually we awoke to the fact that we had no one to take
their places. We had scores of young men learned in Greek, but few in
carpentry or mechanical or architectural drawing. We had trained many
in Latin, but almost none as engineers, bridge-builders, and
machinists. Numbers were taken from the farm and educated, but were
educated in everything else except agriculture. Hence they had no
sympathy with farm life, and did not return to it.

This last that I have been saying is practically a repetition of what
I have said in the preceding paragraph; but, to emphasise it,--and
this point is one of the most important I wish to impress on the
reader,--it is well to repeat, to say the same thing twice. Oh, if
only more who had the shaping of the education of the Negro could
have, thirty years ago, realised, and made others realise, where the
forgetting of the years of manual training and the sudden acquiring
of education were going to lead the Negro race, what a saving it would
have been! How much less my race would have had to answer for, as well
as the white!

But it is too late to cry over what might have been. It is time to
make up, as soon as possible, for this mistake,--time for both races
to acknowledge it, and go forth on the course that, it seems to me,
all mus