Fourth. There is a great field for industrial education in the South, while there is danger that, in handling this complex matter, great and fatal mistakes may be made. 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 which come from a good school. The first thing that the illiterate classes need everywhere in our country for their permanent industrial elevation is six months of thorough elementary training in schools handled by good teachers for five or six years of their lives, and only a generation so taught can ever learn to work in connection with the labor-saving agencies which are revolutionizing every sphere of human industry. 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 our 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 and the various styles of artisan work that its new manufactures will open for girls, with mechanical training for such boys as desire it, and a general improvement of agriculture through local associations of farmers and their wives. This will open into larger provisions for the higher form of technical schools. 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. But any attempt to recast the public school into a semi-industrial institution, in my opinion, will fail of both the ends proposed in the present state of Southern education.

Fifth. The time has come to call a halt in the establishment of new academies and colleges for both races until those on the ground are better endowed and made more effective. The educational scourge of these States now is the great army of brokendown people who are forcing themselves on the public as teachers of private and semiparochial schools, with no real qualification for the office of instructor. In more communities than is known this wasteful practice deprives the people of anything like thorough education, and fills the community with children and youth wretchedly prepared for the duties of life. There are now good secondary and collegiate schools in the South, enough to educate the people, if the people will give them fair support, and their communities will work persistently for their endowment. And with this should go on a general movement for the establishment of free libraries in every community. It will be a questionable advantage to teach a million Southern children to read if they turn to the dime novel, the lower side of the press, or the horrible trash with which every railroad is flooding the country. Every schoolhouse and church should have its children's library, and every community its collection of books suitable for general reading open to all.

Sixth. The Southern people will do well to give every child the great American chance of a fair elementary education and see how he will turn out. That is the only rational, scientific, practical, or Christian way to educate a people. The opposite way is to predict in advance what any set of children can not do, and then see to it that they have no chance given them to do it. And just here, if my words could reach every school district in the Southland, I would say: Give no heed to this noisy crowd of Northern educational cranks who are now filling the press with their preposterous, false, and silly denunciations of the American system of public schools. The American public school has great defects, like everything else, public or private, in the country; but its defects are only those common to every American institution, and it is to be judged like the American family, business, politics, society, literature, and the church, by understanding its better features, marking its direction, and observing its spirit of progress. Judged in this way, our American education of all grades, in the North, is fully abreast of anything in the country, and

is, perhaps, on the whole, more thoroughly alive to its own defects, and more earnestly striving for improvement than any other region of our national life. So I would say to our Southern friends-when Richard Grant White and Gail Hamilton denounce the common school as a failure all round; when ultra scientific experts ridicule it as superficial and misleading; when Bishop McQuade declares it godless, immoral, and communistic; when Dr. Nathan Allen tells you that New England manhood and womanhood are physically going "out the little end of the horn;" when Zachary Montgomery and the crowd of journalistic scribblers declare that the schools are the nursery of laziness; when international novelists and literary lights sneer at our popular education as a nursery of vulgarity; when venerable college presidents and academical principals publish the high school and normal school a failure, it will be perfectly safe to turn a deaf ear, and to go on building up every sort of good school in the South that now exists in the North; for while cranks die and go to their own places, good schools abide.

And out of this review of the educational outlook in the South comes to my mind the unanswerable argument for a wise, generous, and immediate policy of national aid for the people, especially of a dozen of these States, against the appalling illiteracy which is the one great bar to their prosperity. In my view this aid should be immediate and generous, graduated with the sole view to stimulate the energies of the people, kept sharply outside sectarian, religious, and partisan politics, left to the State authorities for administration-of course, under all proper safeguards—and supplemented by judicious continuation of private and Christian beneficence from the North, with a universal effort to make it the occasion of a great revival of kindly feeling through all sections. I believe the time has come when all this can be achieved, but better wait longer than have any imperfect, partisan, or partial attempt that will fail and leave misunderstanding and new jealousy in its wake. Several results of such an act of eminent statesmanship I am confident would be assured.

First. The obstructive class in every community, whose greatest leverage now is in the acknowledged defects of the schools, would become a feeble minority as soon as public education took on the form of respectability and efficiency which such aid would assure.

Second. It would enable thousands of bright young people to obtain the elementary education at home which would fit them for a successful term in the secondary or collegiate school, and lay the foundation of professional success. Now the Southern academies and colleges are clogged with multitudes of students who have grown up with no elementary education, and are therefore unable to use the opportunities obtained by so much sacrifice and toil. A considerable per cent of national aid should be given for the training of teachers by the most practical methods that can be devised by the school authorities of these States.

Third. It will be a mighty encouragement and stimulant to local effort. Hang up a sum of money, to be obtained by any community on the sole condition that it strains every nerve of home resource, and every public-spirited man, every anxious mother, and every aspiring and eager youth besets that community to do its best. There are thousands of neighborhoods in the open Southern country and hundreds of little villages and settlements where such an offer would stimulate the people and, for the first time, bring them together in a hearty movement for the common education of their children.

Such aid, continued for a reasonable time, would root the people's common school in all except peculiar communities, and educate their inhabitants to its permanent support. I have never heard of a community which has enjoyed a good common school for a term of years giving it up for any cause but such as would destroy every public institution. The reason is that a good public school is the most potent stimulus to every other good institution. While in itself it is a powerful agency for mental growth and intelligence, a potent disciplinarian in the common moralities, a nursery

of industry and patriotism, it is, all the time, stirring up the family and the church to new efforts, and in a variety of open and secret ways refreshing the social, industrial, and civic life of the people. The American people know a good thing when they have it, and the Southern people can be trusted to take good care of the school thus rooted and confirmed by national aid.

I leave to others the large and important sphere of argumentation that enforces this imperative duty on the ground of justice, political policy, Christian philanthropy, or defense against impending national calamities more threatening even than any peril of the past. And I must be excused for taking but little stock in the gloomy predictions and dismal apprehensions of many good people in all sections of the country in regard to Southern and national affairs. I do not think I have been deceived in my widely extended observations of the Southern educational situation, or have been blinded by the uniform kindness of these people to the difficulties still to be overcome. I can understand that even wise men, viewing Southern life from a local and limited angle of observation, can differ widely from me in their estimate, or even that eminent educators and social philosophers may be oppressed by anxious doubts concerning the outcome of American society as a whole. But, looking at this Republic along the line of historical perspective, it seems to me that for the past hundred years our new country has been maneuvering for position among the nations of the earth, and that now it stands before the world in an attitude more hopeful, with greater possibilities for a Christian nationality, than any people in Christendom. I can not discover any defect or danger in any section which will not yield to a true education of the head, the heart, and the hand, continued through a few decades, supported by the abundant means, pushed by the united executive capacity, and sanctified by the Christian spirit of our people. And, because 1 believe in this; believe in the possibilities of human nature; believe in the outcome of our American way of dealing with man; believe that the Southern people, even in its most illiterate regions, is at heart thoroughly American; believe that all foreign, obstructive, and un-American classes will either be finally absorbed or cast out from American society; believe that the vision of the fathers will be realized in the glory of the children, I have given my life to this glorious "ministry of education," and have come here to bear my own humble testimony in the great enterprise in which you are embarked to-day.

III.

FOUR YEARS AMONG THE CHILDREN OF THE SOUTH.

Preached at the Church of the Unity, Boston, Mass., December 12, 1884.

Early in the year 1863 I went, as a minister, to the city of Cincinnati, Ohio, then the borderland of our great civil war. For ten years I remained there, occasionally journeying through the Southwest, and observing carefully the state of affairs in the adjacent portion of the former slave States. Unable to go to the field, I was all the time asking myself what was to be my work in the upbuilding that I was sure must follow the complete wreck of the old Southern order of society, and how I could best meet the call of God to every patriotic heart.

It was not long before I came to a very distinct opinion that, after the politicians, the ecclesiastics, and, possibly, some other sorts of people, had reached the end of their favorite plans of national reconciliation, the real work must begin at the foundations, by establishing among the children of the South, of both races and all classes, a system of universal education which in time would lift up the very ground floor of society and develop everything there according to the ideals of our new American life.

This opinion slowly consolidated to a resolve that, when the call should come, I would go over and try to help these people in the beginnings of this mighty work. I could see it was to be a work difficult beyond expression; for up to 1860 there had been, through a large part of the South, no very serious or sustained attempt to establish a system of education for any but the superior class of white folk, and their five millions of slaves were, of course, in almost complete ignorance. So for fifteen years, till 1880, in the Northwestern, Middle, and New England States, I prepared myself industriously for a ministry of education by services and studies in educational affairs, tracing the relations of universal education to American history, and forming a large acquaintance with educational and public men.

Before I was half through with this preparation I heard the big horn blowing for me down in Dixie, and made haste to answer the call. I went forth and, with such support as a few benevolent people of the North and the hospitality of the South gave me, representing no party in politics or sect in religion, have traversed this Southland now for more than four years in this ministry of education. During these crowded years, besides a great deal of work in behalf of the cause done at the North and constant occupation with the press, I have visited fourteen of the Southern States. And so satisfactory has been this experience that I have resolved to keep on doing the work of this ministry as long as God grants the strength and good people furnish me the opportunity and means to do it.

By invitation of the pastor of this church I appear before you this morning to tell a plain story about things I have seen and a part of what I have been able to do in these deeply interesting journeyings among the children and youth of the South. My talk will be in answer to these three questions:

First. What is the actual state of affairs through this vast region, as I have seen it! Second. What opportunities have been afforded me for such work as mine, and just what have I been able to accomplish?

Third. What can we all do in behalf of the present movement by the Southern people for universal education-I do not mean alone by aiding the effort the North is making to establish and support schools in the South, but rather by helping the Southern people carry forward the great system of free, popular education which they, of their own will, have begun within the past fifteen years-a movement incomparably the most interesting and far-reaching of anything that has happened in our country since the close of the war in 1865?

And, first, a word upon the situation.

You can read for yourselves the figures of Southern illiteracy that appear in the national census of 1880. There you will see that in the sixteen States once the fifteen slave States there are nearly 6,000,000 white children and youth under 21, with little more than 3,000,000 enrolled in any school; that not one-half of the 2,000,000 colored children and youth are even enrolled in schools; that the average attendance on schools is far below the enrollment; and that the vast majority of these pupils are in public schools, which at best, in Virginia, give five months, but in several of those States do not represent three solid months of annual instruction; that the teachers in those schools are paid more poorly than the servant and nursery girls in any large Northern town; that the city of Boston, with 400,000 people, pays yearly once and a half as much for education as the great State of Georgia; that one-third the voters even of Kentucky can not read or write, and one-third of her children are in no school; that not one-tenth of the colored voters or two-thirds of the white voters of the whole South make any appreciable use of reading and writing, even when they can read their ballot or write their name. You can also look upon the shrinkage in the valuation of these great States and cities in the years that followed the war, and understand how powerful Commonwealths like Virginia and Tennessee are convulsed even now by the question of paying a State debt which at least three of our new Western cities could carry on their back as easily as a soldier his knapsack. I need not repeat all this, which is public record, disputed by no man who reads. All this I confirmed in the fourteen States visited in my journeyings through more than four years.

But, friends, it is one thing to sit in your parlor at home, in this city, and read these columns of dead figures out of the census, and quite another thing to look through and through the state of society represented thereby, as I have seen it in the shape of living men and women and children.

Imagine, if you can, an old State as populous as Connecticut, more than half her people emancipated slaves and their children; another great multitude, white people, dwelling in such ignorance and aloofness from the higher influences of our time as no native-born class can possibly experience in an old Northern State. Now fancy what we, who regard ourselves an intelligent Christian people, should do in such case, if, after a twenty years' struggle, we found ourselves where the superior class of white people in one of these States, South Carolina, for example, is found to-day. I have come to understand how, in 1865, the whole upper story of Southern society was overturned as completely as the roof of a house was ever blown away in a cyclone, and how the foundations of society were represented by 5,000,000 freedmen, largely without knowledge, without property, the prey to every sort of vice, their very religion a half pagan superstition, suddenly shot up into full citizenship, to do the work of legislation, to hold every office of honor and trust through sixteen States. And opposed to them, the other part of the foundations-another multitude of white people, in every grade of ignorance, full of race prejudice, accustomed to the violent life of a border civilization, ready to break out at any emergency into something worse than ordinary civil war. All that can happen in such a state of things I now understand from what I have seen.

I stood one day in a village of northern Alabama, and looked at a typical group, a family of these poor white mountain folk journeying toward some new home; a wretched scarecrow of a beast dragging a shaky wagon, loaded with the miserable 8819-16