ack man was to enable him to talk
properly to a mule; and the Negro's education did great injustice to
the mule, since the language tended to confuse him and make him
balky."

We need not continue the story, except to add that to-day the grasp of
the hand of this ex-slaveholder, and the listening to his hearty words
of gratitude and commendation for the education of the Negro, are
enough to compensate those who have given and those who have worked
and sacrificed for the elevation of my people through all of these
years. If we are patient, wise, unselfish, and courageous, such
examples will multiply as the years go by.

Before closing this chapter,--which, I think, has clearly shown that
there is at present a very distinct lack of industrial training in
the South among the Negroes,--I wish to say a few words in regard to
certain objections, or rather misunderstandings, which have from time
to time arisen in regard to the matter.

Many have had the thought that industrial training was meant to make
the Negro work, much as he worked during the days of slavery. This is
far from my idea of it. If this training has any value for the Negro,
as it has for the white man, it consists in teaching the Negro how
rather not to work, but how to make the forces of nature--air, water,
horse-power, steam, and electric power--work for him, how to lift
labour up out of toil and drudgery into that which is dignified and
beautiful. The Negro in the South works, and he works hard; but his
lack of skill, coupled with ignorance, causes him too often to do his
work in the most costly and shiftless manner, and this has kept him
near the bottom of the ladder in the business world. I repeat that
industrial education teaches the Negro how not to drudge in his work.
Let him who doubts this contrast the Negro in the South toiling
through a field of oats with an old-fashioned reaper with the white
man on a modern farm in the West, sitting upon a modern "harvester,"
behind two spirited horses, with an umbrella over him, using a machine
that cuts and binds the oats at the same time,--doing four times as
much work as the black man with one half the labour. Let us give the
black man so much skill and brains that he can cut oats like the white
man, then he can compete with him. The Negro works in cotton, and has
no trouble so long as his labour is confined to the lower forms of
work,--the planting, the picking, and the ginning; but, when the Negro
attem