ming it into the consciousness of
the Negro farmer that as long as he remained ignorant and improvident
he was sure to be exploited and imposed upon. He used to illustrate
this by the story of the ignorant Negro who after paying a white man
fifty cents a week for six months on a five-dollar loan cheerfully
remarked: "Dat Mr. ---- sho is one fine gen'lman, cause he never has
ast me fo' one cent ob dat principal." It may be surmised that this
type of money lender is not enthusiastic over Negro education.

It is significant of the importance which Booker Washington attached
to agriculture that the first great Federal official whom he invited
to visit the school was the National Secretary of Agriculture. In 1897
he got the Hon. James Wilson, Secretary of Agriculture in President
McKinley's Cabinet, to visit Tuskegee and attend the dedication of the
school's first agricultural building.

Secretary Wilson arrived at night accompanied by Dr. J.L.M. Curry, a
Southerner, a leader of the educational thought of the South, and the
secretary of the John F. Slater Fund Board. The students lined up on
either side of the main thoroughfare through the school grounds with
back of them a great gathering of the farmers from the surrounding
territory and many from a distance. Each one of this great throng was
given a pine torch and all these torches were simultaneously lighted
as Secretary Wilson entered the school grounds. The Secretary and
Doctor Curry, preceded by the Institute Band, rode between these two
great masses of cheering people and flaming torches.

The next day the dedication exercises were held on a specially
constructed platform piled high with the finest specimens of every
product known to that section of the South. On this platform, with the
Secretary and Doctor Curry, were the State Commissioner of Agriculture
and several other high State officials and many other prominent white
citizens. This was the formal launching of the Agricultural Department
of the school. George W. Carver, the full-blooded African and eminent
agricultural scientist, of whom mention has already been made, had
recently been placed in charge of this department. He had come from
the Agricultural Department of Iowa State College, of which Secretary
Wilson had been the head.

The annual budget of this department alone is now nearly fifty
thousand dollars a year, and more than a thousand acres of land are
cultivated under the supervision of the agric