difference between learning and ignorance, between religion and superstition. They have no knowledge of slavery. They are a new generation of free-born people. Their improvement is phenomenal, but no corresponding improvement has come to the ministry. That the ministry has greatly improved during this twenty years no one who has visited their churches or attended their associations can doubt. Considering their advantages, they are a very able body of men. Some of them rank among the best preachers of the South. Many of the younger of them have had more or less training in our colleges. The Richmond, Atlanta, and Gammon theological seminaries have sent out a small quota. But as yet not a thousand in all the South have had even a college education. Nearly the whole educational machinery thus far has been occupied in supplying the great demand for teachers, and the whole force of educated talent has been drawn to the schools. The fact mentioned a while since that less than 1,000 in the whole South are at this moment engaged in collegiate study is to be accounted for not by want of capacity for higher studies, but for want of motive. Education costs them a great deal. Nearly every one earns every dollar which he pays for his learning. With most it has been a great struggle to reach the point of normal graduation, and then the best salary for teaching at present available is open to them. Every influence urges them to stop here and reap the fruits of their hard-earned attainment. Moreover, the influences around them all tend to discourage higher attainment. Some have brothers and sisters to educate, and must stay at home to earn the money. Others have mothers and fathers who are struggling with poverty and debt, and who now claim their services to help them out. All their neighbors say, "You know enough now, since you have been teaching the whole neighborhood." To break away from all this requires higher incentive and a stronger pressure than comes to most of them. Meanwhile, the old people and their ministers go on in the ruts of ignorance and superstition. The uneducated ministers (however good and gifted with natural ability) are unable to keep pace with the young people in intelligence or to retain their influence over them. A breach is growing. A moral drift away from religion is beginning to manifest itself. There is danger ahead for which no adequate provision is in sight. What shall that provision be? Ministers' institutes? Some helpful suggestions can be doubtless made to the existing ministry by their educated white brethren. But he must have great faith in the receptive powers of the average negro who supposes that a mature man can be transformed from ignorance to erudition by a week or ten days annually of lecturing. Shall we take them into our colleges? It is too late. They are too old to begin a course of study. They are ashamed to expose their ignorance. Many have families. Gladly as we would help them in their conscious need, and deeply as our hearts are stirred by their struggle, the problem is insoluble in that direction. The only hope for a ministry which will really lead and properly teach the next generation of the colored race is through the legitimate methods of education. How shall this be reached? How shall we bridge this chasm between an educated people and an ignorant ministry? To meet this crisis wisdom and generalship are needful. It is our duty as their friends to point out the danger and to provide the remedy. The motive which is lacking should be somehow supplied. Six hundred years ago illiteracy in England well-nigh approached that of the negro American of to-day. It is said that only five of the twenty-five barons who signed the Magna Charta could write their names. Her Christian philanthropists saw the evil, and established prizes, denominated "bursaries," scholarships," and "fellowships," to stimulate high attainments in study. The accumulation of these prizes by the wise forecast of our English ancestors really constitutes the basis of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. 77 66 The duty of the hour for us toward our Southern brethren is not only to endow the colleges which we have established, but to offer to those who by their own exertions have attained the rank of college students a prize sufficient to enable and stimulate them to go on to the full stature of intellectual manhood. Here is an opportunity for the use of consecrated wealth. Who will avail himself of it, as Daniel Hand has done for the American Missionary Association? What shall we say, now, about the relation of industrial training to our problem? Industrial training is good and useful to some persons, if they can afford time to take it. But in its application to the negro several facts should he clearly understood: 1. It appears not to be generally known in the North that in the South all trades and occupations are open to the negro, and always have been. Before the war slaves were taught mechanics' arts, because they thereby became more profitable to their masters. And now every village has its negro mechanics, who are patronized both by white and colored employers, and any who wish to learn the trade can do so. 2. It is a mistake to suppose that industrial education can be wisely applied to the beginnings of school life. Said the Rev. A. D. Mayo, than whom no man in America is better acquainted with the condition and wants of the South: "There are two specious, un-American notions now masquerading under the taking phrase, "industrial education:" First, that it is possible or desirable to train large bodies of youth to superior industrial skill without a basis of sound elementary education. You can not polish a brickbat, and you can not make a good workman of a plantation negro or a white ignoramus until you first wake up his mind, and give him the mental discipline and knowledge that comes from a good school; second, that it is possible or desirable to train masses of American children on the European idea that the child will follow the calling of his father. Class education has no place in the order of society, and the American people will never accept it in any form. The industrial training needed in the South must be obtained by the establishment of special schools of improved housekeeping for girls, with mechanical trainimg for such boys as desire it. And this training should be given impartially to both races, without regard to the thousand and one theories of what the colored man can not do." * * 3. Industrial training is expensive of time and money, as compared with its results as a civilizer. When you have trained one student you have simply fitted one man to earn an ordinary living. When you have given a college education to a man with brains you have sent forth an instrumentality that will affect hundreds or thousands. Said Chauncey M. Depew, in his address at the tenth convention of the University of Chicago, in April, 1895: "I acknowledge the position and the usefulness of the business college, the manual training school, the technological institute, the scientific school, and the schools of mines, medicine, law, and theology. They are of infinite importance to the youth who has not the money, the time, or the opportunity to secure a liberal education. They are of equal benefit to the college graduate who has had a liberal education in training him for his selected pursuit. But the theorists, or rather the practical men who are the architects of their own fortunes, and who are proclaiming on every occasion that a liberal education is a waste of time for a business man, and that the boy who starts early and is trained only for his one pursuit is destined for a larger success, are doing infinite harm to the ambitious youth of this country. "The college, in its four years of discipline, training, teaching, and development, makes the boy the man. His Latin and his Greek, his rhetoric and his logic, his science and his philosophy, his mathematics and his history, have little or nothing to do with law or medicine or theology, and still less to do with manufacturing, or mining, or storekeeping, or stocks, or grain, or provisions. But they have given to the youth, when he has graduated, the command of that superb intelligence with which God has endowed him, by which, for the purpose of a living or a fortune, he grasps his profession or his business and speedily overtakes the boy who, abandoning college opportunities, gave his narrow life to the narrowing pursuit of the one thing by which he expected to earn a living. The college-bred man has an equal opportunity for bread and butter, but beyond that he becomes a citizen of commanding influence and a leader in every community where he settles." 4. Industrial training is liable to divert attention from the real aim and end of education, which is manhood. The young scholar can not serve two masters. It requires all the energy there is in a boy to nerve him to the high resolve that in spite of all difficulties he will patiently discipline himself until he becomes a man. This is one reason why our northern colleges, which in many cases began as manual-labor schools, have abandoned it. Ought we to insist on "putting a yoke upon the necks" of our brethren in black "which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear?" Finally, experience seems to show that industrial education does not educate, even in trades. In the report of the Bureau of Education for 1889-90 is a full statistical table of the lines of business in which the graduates of 17 colored schools are employed. In all these schools industrial instruction is given, such as carpentry, tinning, painting, whip making, plastering, shoemaking, tailoring, blacksmithing, farming, gardening, etc. Out of 1,243 graduates of these schools there are found to be only 12 farmers, 2 mechanics, 1 carpenter. The names of the universities are Allen (S. C.); Atlanta (Ga.); Berea (Ky.); Central Tennessee (Tenn.); Claflin (S. C.); Fiske (Tenn.); Knoxville (Tenn.); Livingstone (N. C.); New Orleans (La.); Paul Quinn (Tex.); Philander Smith (Ark.); Roger Williams (Tenn.); Rust (Miss.); Southern, New Orleans, La.; Straight, New Orleans, La.; Tuskegee (Ala.); Wilberforce (Ohio). The employments of the graduates were: Teachers, 693; ministers, 117; physicians, 163; lawyers, 116; college professors, 27; editors, 5; merchants, 15; farmers, 12; carpenter, 1; United States Government service, 36; druggists, 5; dentists, 14; bookkeepers, 2; printers, 2; mechanics, 2; butchers, 3; other pursuits, 30. The money appropriated to these schools by the Slater fund from 1884 to 1894 was $139,981.78. CHAPTER XXXII. THE SLATER FUND AND THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO. Compiled from Occasional Papers published by the trustees of the John F. Slater fund, Nos. 1 to 6.'] 1 Contents.—I. Difficulties, complications, and limitations connected with the education of the negro. II. Education of the negroes since 1860. III. Occupations of the negroes. IV. A statistical sketch of the negroes in the United States. V. Memorial sketches of John F. Slater. VI. Documents relating to the origin and work of the Slater trustees: (a) Charter from the State of New York; (b) letter of the founder; (c) letter of the trustees accepting the gift; (d) the thanks of Congress; (e) by-laws; (ƒ) members of the board; (g) remarks of President Hayes on the death of Mr. Slater. I. DIFFICULTIES, COMPLICATIONS, AND LIMITATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO. [By J. L. M. Curry, LL. D., secretary of the trustees of the John F. Slater fund.] Civilization certainly, Christianity probably, has encountered no problem which surpasses in magnitute or complexity the negro problem. For its solution political remedies, very drastic, have been tried, but have failed utterly. Educational agencies have been very beneficial as a stimulus to self-government and are increasingly hopeful and worthy of wider application, but they do not cure social diseases, moral ills. Much has been written of evolution of man, of human society, and history shows marvelous progress in some races, in some countries, in the bettering of habits and institutions, but this progress is not found, in any equal degree, in the negro race in his native land. What has occurred in the United States has been from external causes. Usually human development has come from voluntary energy, from self-evolved organizations of higher and higher efficiency, from conditions which are principally the handiwork of man himself. With the negro, whatever progress has marked his life as a race in this country has come from without. The great ethical and political revolutions of enlightened nations, through the efforts of successive generations, have not been seen in his history. When, on March 4, 1882, our large-hearted and broadminded founder established this trust, he had a noble end in view. For near thirteen years the trustees have kept the object steadily before them, with varying results. Expectations have not always been realized. If any want of highest success has attended our efforts, this is not an uncompanioned experience. As was to have been foreseen, in working out a novel and great problem, difficulties have arisen. Some are inherent and pertain to the education of the negro, however, and by whomsoever undertaken, and some are peculiar to the trust. Some are remedial. In this, as, in all other experiments, it is better to ascertain and comprehend the difficulties so as to adopt and adjust the proper measures for displacing or overcoming them. A general needs to Announcement to the series.-The trustees of the John F. Slater fund propose to publish from time to time papers that relate to the education of the colored race. These papers are designed to furnish information to those who are concerned in the administration of schools, and also to those who by their official stations are called upon to act or to advise in respect to the care of such institutions. The trustees believe that the experimental period in the education of the blacks is drawing to a tose. Certain principles that were doubted thirty years ago now appear to be generally recognized 29 sound. In the next thirty years better systems will undoubtedly prevail, and the aid of the separate States is likely to be more and more freely bestowed. There will also be abundant room for continued generosity on the part of individuals and associations. It is to encourage and assist the workers and the thinkers that these papers will be published. Each paper will be the utterance of the writer whose name is attached to it, the trustees disclaiming in advance all responsibility for the statement of facts and opinions. know the strength and character of the opposing force. A physician can not prescribe intelligently until he knows the condition of his patient. The income of the fund is limited in amount, and the means of accomplishing "the general object" of the trust are indicated in Mr. Slater's letter and conversations and by the repeatedly declared policy of the board-as teacher training and industrial training. He specified "the training of teachers from among the people requiring to be taught and the 'encouragement of such institutions as are most effectually useful in promoting this training of teachers."" No one, in the least degree familiar with the subject, can deny or doubt that the essential need of the race is a higher and better qualified class of teachers. The fund does not establish nor control schools, nor appoint teachers. It cooperates with schools established by States, by religious denominations, and by individuals. Mr. Slater did not purpose bestow charity upon the destitute, to encourage a few exceptional individuals, to build churches, schoolhouses, or asylums." Aided schools may accept money to carry out the specific purposes of the trust, but they often have other and prescribed objects, and hence what the trustees seek is naturally, perhaps unavoidably, subordinated to what are the predetermined and unchangeable ends of some of these schools. "to The most obvious hindrance in the way of the education of the negro has so often been presented and discussed—his origin, history, environments-that it seems superfluous to treat it anew. His political status, sudden and unparalleled, complicated by antecedent condition, excited false hopes and encouraged the notion of reaching per saltum, without the use of the agencies of time, labor, industry, discipline, what the dominant race had attained after centuries of toil and trial and sacrifice. Education, property, habits of thrift and self-control, higher achievements of civilization, are not extemporized nor created by magic or legislation. Behind the Caucasian lie centuries of the educating, uplifting influence of civilization, of the institutions of family, society, the churches, the state, and the salutary effects of Leredity. Behind the negro are centuries of ignorance, barbarism, slavery, superstition, idolatry, fetichism, and the transmissible consequences of heredity. Nothing valuable or permanent in human life has been secured without the substratum of moral character, of religious motive, in the individual, the family, the community. In this matter the negro should be judged charitably, for his aboriginal people were not far removed from the savage state, where they knew neither house nor home and had not enjoyed any religious training. Their condition as slaves debarred them the advantage of regular, continuous, systematic instruction. The negro began his life of freedom and citizenship with natural weaknesses uncorrected, with loose notions of piety and morality and with strong racial peculiarities and proclivities, and has not outgrown the feebleness of the moral sense which is common to all primitive races. One religious organization, which has acted with great liborality, and generally with great wisdom, in its missionary and educational work among the negroes, says: "Of the paganism in the South, Dr. Behrends has well said that the note of paganism is its separation of worship from virtue, of religion from morals. This is the characteristic fact of the religion of the negro." The Plantation Missionary, of this year, a journal edited and published for the improvement of the "black belt" of Alabama, says, "five millions of negroes are still illiterate, and multitudes of them idle, bestial, and degraded, with slight ideas of purity or thrift." The discipline of virtue, the incorporation of creed into personal life, is largely wanting, and hence physical and hysterical demonstrations, excited sensibilities, uncontrolled emotions, transient outbursts of ardor, have been confounded with the graces of the spirit and of faith based on knowledge. Contradiction, negation, paradox, and eccentricity are characteristics of the ignorant and superstitious, especially when they concern themselves with religion. The economic condition is a most serious drawback to mental and moral progress. Want of thrift, of frugality, of foresight, of skill, of right notions of consumption and of proper habits of acquiring and holding property, has made the race the victim and prey of usurers and extortioners. The negro rarely accumulates, for he does not keep his savings, nor put them in permanent and secure investments. He seems to be under little stimulus toward social improvement, or any ambition except that of being able to live from day to day. "As to poverty, 80 per cent of the wealth of the nation is in the North and only 20 per cent in the South. Of this 20 per cent a very small share, indeed, falls to the seven millions of negroes, who constitute by far the poorest element of our American people." (American Missionary, November, 1894, p. 390.) "While it is true that a limited number of the colored people are becoming well-to-do, it is also equally true that the masses of them have made but little advance in acquiring property during their thirty years of freedom. Millions of them are yet in real poverty and can do little more than simply maintain physical existence." (Home Missionary Monthly, August, 1894, p. 318.) No trustworthy statement of the property held by negroes is possible, because but few States, in assessing property, discriminate between the races. In Occasional Papers, No. 4 (see p. 1404) Mr. Gannett, in discussing the tendency of population toward cities, concludes that "the negro is not fitted, either by nature or education, for those vocations for the pursuit of which men collect in cities," and that as the inclinations of the race "tend to keep it wedded to the soil, the probabilities are that the great body of the negroes will continue to remain aloof from the cities and cultivate the soil as heretofore." The black farm laborers hire to white proprietors, work for wages or on shares, give a lien on future earnings for food, clothing, shelter, and the means for cultivation of the crops. The meager remainder, if it exist at all, is squandered in neighboring stores for whisky, tobacco, and worthless “goods." Thus the negro in his industrial progress is hindered by his rude and primitive methods of farming, his wastefulness and improvidence. The manner of living almost necessarily begets immorality and degradation. Mr. Washington, in his useful annual conferences, has emphasized the need of improved rural abodes and the fatal consequences of crowding a whole family into one room. The report already quoted from (Home Monthly, p. 22) says: "On the great plantations (and the statement might be much further extended) there Las been but little progress in thirty years. The majority live in one-room cabins, tabernacling in thein as tenants at will." The poverty, wretchedness, hopelessness of the present life are sometimes in pitiable contrast to the freedom from care and anxiety, the cheerfulness and frolicsomeness, of ante-bellum days. The average status of the negro is much misunderstood by some persons. The incurable tendency of opinion seems to be to exaggerated optimism or pessimism, to eager expectancy of impossible results or distrust or incredulity as to future progress. It is not easy to form an accurate judgment of a country, or of its population, or to generalize logically, from a Pullman car window, or from snatches of conversation with a porter or waiter, or from the testimony of one race only, or from exceptional cases like Bruce, Price, Douglass, Washington, Revels, Payne, Simmons, etc. Individual cases do not demonstrate a general or permanent widening of range of mental possibilities. Thirty years may test and develop instances of personal success, of individual manhood, but are too short a time to bring a servile race, as a whole, up to equality with a race which is the heir of centuries of civilization, with its uplifting results and accessories. It should be cheerfully conceded that some negroes have displayed abilities of a high order and have succeeded in official and professional life, in pulpit and literature. The fewness gives conspicuousness, but does not justify an a priori assumption adverse to future capability of the race. Practically, no negro born since 1860 was ever a slave. More than a generation has passed since slavery ceased in the United States. Despite some formidable obstacles, the negroes have been favored beyond any other race known in the history of mankind. Freedom, citizenship, suffrage, civil and political rights, educational Opportunities and religious privileges, every method and function of civilization, have been secured and fostered by Federal and State governments, ccclesiastical organizations, munificent individual benefactions, and yet the results have not been, on the whole, such as to inspire most sanguine expectations, or justify conclusions of rapid development or of racial equality. In some localities there has been degeneracy rather than ascent in the scale of manhood, relapse instead of progress. The unusual environments should have evolved a higher and more rapid degree of advancement. Professor Mayo-Smith, who has made an ethnological and sociological study of the diverse elements of our population, says: "No one can as yet predict what position the black race will ultimately take in the population of this country." He would be a bold speculator who ventured, from existing facts, to predict what would be the outcome of our experiment with African citizenship and African development. Mr. Bryce, the most philosophical and painstaking of all foreign students of our institutions, in the last edition of his great work, says: "There is no ground for despondency to anyone who remembers how hopeless the extinction of slavery seemed sixty or even forty years ago, and who marks the progress which the negroes have made since their sudden liberation. Still less is there reason for impatience, for questions like this have in some countries of the Old World required ages for their solution. The problem which confronts the South is one of the great secular problems of the world, presented here under a form of peculiar difficulty. And as the present differences between the African and the European are the prodnet of thousands of years, during which one race was advancing in the temperate, and the other remaining stationary in the torrid zone, so centuries may pass before their relations as neighbors and fellow-citizens have been duly adjusted." It would be unjust and illogical to push too far the comparison and deduce inferences unfair to the negro, but it is an interesting coincidence that Japan began her entrance into the family of civilized nations almost contemporaneously with emancipation in the United States. In 1858 I witnessed the unique reception by President Buchanan, in the east room of the White House, of the commissioners from Japan. With a rapidity without a precedent, she has taken her place as an equal and independent nation, and her rulers demand acknowledgment at the highest courts, and her ministers are officially the equals of their colleagues in every diplomatic corps. By |