he year in all lines of
endeavor and at the same time furnish a directory of all the business
and social activities of the Negroes of the community. It is pointed
out that the sale of advertising space in its pages would alone more
than pay for such a directory.

It will be noted that these business leagues, like all other
organizations founded or moulded by Booker Washington, do not stick
to their lasts in any narrow sense. Mr. Washington never lost sight of
the fact that the fundamental concern of all human beings was living,
and that farming, business, education, recreation, or what not, were
only important in so far as they made the whole of life better worth
living. The means employed never obscured his vision of the aim sought
as is so frequently and unhappily the case with lesser men.

Just as at the agricultural conferences, so at these business
gatherings, Booker Washington used the methods employed by the
revivalist at the experience meeting. By so doing he accomplished the
double purpose of encouraging the successful by the tribute of public
recognition and spurring on the less successful and the unsuccessful
to go and do likewise. Also by means of men and women telling their
fellows in open meeting how they achieved their success the race is,
as it were, revealed to itself. It was, for instance, through a
meeting of the National Negro Business League that it came to light
that the man who raises the most potatoes in the United States, and
who is commonly known as the Potato King of the West, is a Negro--J.G.
Groves of Edwardsville, Kan. Groves' story at one of the annual
meetings attracted so much attention that an account of his life later
appeared in an illustrated special article in the _American Magazine_.
It was also discovered through a league meeting that Scott Bond,
another colored man, was probably the most successful farmer in the
State of Arkansas. After he had told his story at the meeting of the
National League held in New York in 1910 he was pursued by cameramen
and interviewers for days and weeks and his story was spread all over
the United States. At the Chicago meeting of 1912 Watt Terry, a modest
and even shrinking colored man of Brockton, Mass., unfolded a
remarkable story of success in spite of the hardest and must untoward
circumstances. So unbelievable seemed this man's story that the
Executive Committee took up with him personally the facts of his
recital, and later the Secretary of