iew to be mistaken.

[Illustration: ROSCOE C. BRUCE.

Director of the Academic Department.]

The very industries at Tuskegee presuppose a considerable range of
academic study. Tuskegee does not graduate hoe-hands or plowboys.
Agriculture is, of course, fundamental--fundamental in recognition of
the fact that the Negro population is mainly a farming population, and
of the truth that something must be done to stem the swelling tide which
each year sweeps thousands of black men and women and children from the
sunlit monotony of the plantation to the sunless iniquity of the slums,
from a drudgery that is not quite cheerless to a competition that is
altogether merciless. But the teaching of agriculture, even in its
elementary stages, presupposes a considerable amount of academic
preparation. To be sure, a flourishing garden may be made and managed by
bright-eyed tots just out of the kindergarten, but how can commercial
fertilizers be carefully analyzed by a boy who has made no study of
general chemistry? and how can a balanced ration be adjusted by an
illiterate person? Similarly, the girl in the laundry does not make soap
by rote, but by principle; and the girl in the dressmaking-shop does
not cut out her pattern by luck, or guess, or instinct, or rule of
thumb, but by geometry. And so the successful teaching of the industries
demands no mean amount of academic preparation. In this lies the
technical utility of Tuskegee's Academic Department.

Then, too, a public service has been rendered by Hampton and Tuskegee in
showing that industrial training--the system in which the student learns
by doing and is paid for the commodities he produces--may be so managed
as to educate. Among the excellencies of industrial training, I would
state that the severe commercial test in which sentiment plays no part
is applied as consistently to the student's labor as is the force of
gravitation to a falling body. Here we must keep in mind the unavoidably
concrete nature of the product, whether satisfactory or not; the
discipline such training affords in organized endeavor; the stimulus it
offers to all the virtues of a drudgery which, though it repel an
unusually ardent and sensitive temperament, yet wears a precious jewel
in its head; and an exceptionally keen sense of responsibility, since on
occasion large amounts of money and the esteem of the school at large
and the lives of a student's fellows depend upon his circumspection and
s