dependence on the white, Hightower spoke of something he
called racial solidarity. It was plain that he meant his Negro hearers
to make much of the Negro's capacity for self-direction.

There was little bitterness and no radicalism in the speech, but to J.W.
it had a queer, new note. He said as much to Mr. Drury, on the way home.
"Why, that Hightower hardly ever mentioned the church, although he was
speaking at a church meeting. And how independent he was!"

"So you noticed that, did you?" the pastor responded. "To me it is one
of the signs of a new day."

"But do you think it is a good day, Mr. Drury?" queried J.W.

"Yes--perhaps; I don't know. Anyhow, it is new, and some of the blame
for it is on our shoulders. The way the Negro thinks and feels to-day is
a striking proof of the fact, often forgotten, that when you settle old
questions you raise new ones."

"Maybe," said J.W. doubtfully, "but I didn't know we had settled the
Negro question."

"Nor I," agreed Mr. Drury. "What we--I mean, we Methodists--settled when
we began to deal with the Negro right after emancipation was not the
race question. It was not even a missionary question, in the old sense,
but it was the question of the nature of the education we should give
the young colored people. For we set out deliberately to give them
schooling first, with evangelism as an accompaniment. The stress was on
education, and we decided at the outset on a certain sort of education."

"I should think," ventured J.W., "that any old sort of education would
serve; the first teachers had to begin at the bottom, didn't they?"

"Yes, and lower than any beginnings you know anything about," the pastor
replied. "Our first workers began without equipment, without
encouragement, and without everything else except a great pity for the
freedman. Did you notice, by the way, that the speaker to-night never
said 'freedman' or mentioned slavery? It is a new day, I tell you."

"I wish you'd explain just what you mean by that, Mr. Drury," J.W. said.
"I don't seem to get it."

"I mean," said Mr. Drury, "that as soon as our church had decided to do
something for the emancipated slaves, it began to work out a scheme of
Negro education. That was before Tuskegee, and even before Hampton
Institute. Maybe we never thought of the Booker Washington idea, or
purely industrial education, but at any rate we went on the theory that
the Negro deserved and in time could take as good an education