culture as the aim of life. And when a man begins to
pride himself upon his culture, he hasn't any to speak of. Culture must
be merely incidental, and to clutch it is like capturing a butterfly:
you do not secure the butterfly at all--you get only a grub.

Let us say right here that there is only one way in which a Negro, or a
white man, can ever make himself respected. Statute law will not do it;
rights voted him by the State are of small avail; making demands will
not secure the desired sesame. If we ever gain the paradise of freedom
it will be because we have earned it--because we deserve it. A
make-believe education may suffice for a white man--especially if he has
a rich father, but a Negro who has to carve out his own destiny must be
taught order, system, and quiet, persistent, useful effort.

A college that has its students devote one-half their time to actual,
useful work is so in line with commonsense that we are amazed that the
idea had to be put into execution by the ex-slave as a life-saver for
his disenfranchised race. Our great discoveries are always accidents: we
work for one thing and get another. I expect that the day will come, and
erelong, when the great universities of the world will have to put the
Tuskegee Idea into execution in order to save themselves from being
distanced by the Colored Race.

If life were one thing and education another, it might be all right to
separate them. Culture of the head over a desk, and indoor gymnastics
for the body, are not the ideal, and that many succeed in spite of the
handicap is no proof of the excellence of the plan. Ships that go around
the world accumulate many barnacles, but barnacles as a help to the
navigator are an iridescent dream.

A little regular manual labor, rightly mixed with the mental, eliminates
draw-poker, highballs, brawls, broils, Harvard Beer, Yale Mixture,
Princeton Pinochle, Chippee dances, hazing, roistering, rowdyism and the
bulldog propensity. The Heidelberg article of cocked hat and insolent
ways is not produced at Tuskegee. At Tuskegee there is no place for
those who lie in wait for insults and regard scrapping as a fine art. As
for college athletics at the Orthodox Universities, only one man out of
ten ever does anything at it anyway--the college man who needs the
gymnasium most is practically debarred from everything in it and serves
as a laughing-stock whenever he strips. Coffee, cocaine, bromide,
tobacco and strong drink often