lished in every Southern State at the most vital centers, and in no way could such correct information be obtained concerning the entire status of the Negro population of the South as by this familiar communication with their students, drawn from every portion of this vast area. For two years this engagement held, only suspended because the special work contemplated was accomplished. It involved a residence in these institutions during a considerable portion of these years, with every opportunity for close observation. It was soon apparent that, without official invitation, I was expected to visit the similar schools of all the religious denominations of the North on my line of operations, with substantially the same opportunities.

The intimate connection with this class of schools was no bar to the most friendly reception by every class of educational institutions. through these sixteen States. Armed with the best testimonials, I placed myself at once in connection with the public-school authorities, State, municipal, and local. I also found the "latchstring out" of every important private and Protestant denominational and collegiate school for white students in every Southern State, with opportunities for observation and work only limited by personal ability. I was constantly among the new Southern common schools for the Negroes, and in constant and friendly relations with the educational public of the section. In this way I was saved from the chronic temptation to a partial view, enabled to compass the entire circle of life in which the question of Negro education is involved. Meanwhile I have never lost my hold on this body of Northern Mission Schools, which still remains practically the citadel of the whole system of the schooling of the seven millions of these people, furnishing a large majority of their superior teachers and professional leaders.

I regard it a peculiar advantage in the just estimate of this department of Southern education that I have been able to study it from a point of view singularly favorable. I have traversed all the Southern States as an educational observer, fully committed to the most advanced ideas of universal education, with no question concerning the essentials of American civilization; with as little partisan, sectarian, or sectional prejudice as is consistent with a devout belief in the religion of Jesus Christ and an immovable faith in American republican civilization; with a sincere and growing appreciation of and affection for all classes and both races of the Southern people.

My first impression of Negro education at Hampton, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Austin, Montgomery, Talladega, Atlanta, and other important centers of the secondary and higher instruction was a profound astonishment at the intelligence, mental vivacity, teachableness, remarkable subordination to discipline, and general good conduct of the pupils in all these great schools. During these first two years I probably saw in them 10,000 colored students in all the Southern States east of the Mississippi, besides Texas. I found in them all an audience

for my familiar lectures, not alone on school work, but ranging through the whole theme of their new American citizenship, which gratified me by its intelligent and responsive appreciation, and let me into many of the secrets of effective public speech. Since those years I have rarely prepared an educational address, even for a Northern university, which has not been "tried on" as a familiar extemporaneous talk before a colored audience; and the talks that most deeply interested them have proved to be, with due elaboration, the most acceptable to the critical student crowd in the college chapel or the great assembly on commencement day.

LIV.

I was constantly asking myself and everybody I met, how this condition was to be explained? These students were generally from the superior class of colored people, at least the class which had the greatest desire for good schooling. But, as late as 1880, they were chiefly the children of parents who had once been enslaved, with small opportunity for scholastic treatment at home and receiving little advantage in the poor country schools from which they came. They had not been so long under the influence of their present discipline as to be essentially changed in these particulars. It was the first of the numerous puzzles in Negro education which I encountered, and I doubt if I should so soon have begun to unravel this tangled skein had I not all this time been among the people who, in some respects, know more of the general capabilities of the Negro; certainly have been more intimately connected with him, than the people of the North. I found the more zealous of the workers in these schools quite carried off their feet by this phenom enon which, along with the mysterious "magnetic " quality of the race, often seemed to involve the whole life of their teachers in a mental and spiritual mirage, in which all things were magnified, and these children of nature loomed up as a new-found superior race. Not only was it claimed by many of these teachers, especially the religious workers, that the Negro student was as capable as his brother in white of every grade of mental training, but in religious capacity was actually the superior of the American white child and youth of European descent. Many of the Northern churches and communities were lifted to a strange and powerful enthusiasm by the fervid reports of this class of workers, enforced by the interesting platform exercises and pathetic singing of the troups of traveling students that usually accompanied the missionary. It was certainly a temptation to the young college graduates, often soldiers, who were appointed to the supervision of these great schools, to believe the testimony of their enthusiastic subordinates concerning their new constituency. They honestly enough assumed the titles-president and professor-in institutions christened by the most venerable educational names-college and university-and governed essentially on the same plan as Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. It was no disparagement

of these teachers, often gathered from the best schools of the North, always drawn from a good social class, frequently representing the most distinguished society, that in the mental and moral intoxication of this singular environment, possessed by a consecration in which religious and patriotic considerations were intimately blended, they should be swept along the swift "tide of successful experiment." Successful it was, in a striking degree, in the enthusiastic desire for education and the sacrifice it inspired in thousands of these young people, their parents and friends; successful in the devoted and exhausting toils of their faithful teachers-living under the same roof, bound with a tie almost as close as the family relation to this palpitating crowd of dependent, affectionate and exacting boys and girls; uniformly successful in the glorified reports of the work before excited congregations of Northern Christian people, trained by fifty years of missionary support in foreign lands, elated by the still recent triumph of the national arms, emancipation and reconstruction in the South, ready to put forth more money and receive with distinguished honors their own children and friends returning from the Southern field for the usual summer campaign at home.

LV.

But I could not fail to see what an advantage it would have been at the early stage of this great enterprise, could these workers have been brought into friendly relations with the superior class of the Southern people, who within twenty years had been the masters and mistresses of this enslaved race, and who had periled and lost their all in an hon est and heroic defense of Southern society as it existed up to 1860. It would have given these new comers the inside view, without which the most vital facts concerning a people so circumstanced can not be correctly known. It would have somewhat cooled the ardor of the early enthusiasm, dimmed the rainbow hues of many a splendid prophecy, but also have saved many a noble man and woman from the reaction into a disappointment and disgust as misleading as the mount of exaltation from which they had descended. Still, only in this way could the marvelous fact of this wonderful liveliness and eagerness of mind and undeniable capacity for many sorts of information find an intelligent explanation.

But, unhappily, this intimate communion even with the Christian people of the South had not then become possible, and even to-day is very imperfectly established. I found a group of admirable Southern men, as often laymen as clergymen, in all these educational centers, with a remarkable appreciation of the service rendered to the South by these schools; ready to welcome all the sensible teachers and workers to a personal acquaintance that often ripened to friendship; in all practicable ways standing between the schools and the majority of the community. And there were "noble women not a few " who, in spite of

the disparagement of society and the indifference or hostility of the churches, persisted in a close communion with the corresponding class of these workers, always ready to aid to the uttermost of their power.

But the work was so exacting in itself, the situation of the majority of the schools so remote from the residence of the better sort of people in the towns, and the home and outdoor duties of their Southern friends so overwhelming, that less came from this acquaintance than could be hoped. And it must be remembered that some of these workers were neither qualified by previous culture nor breadth of view to appreciate anything beyond the immediate task at hand. This class regarded themselves, honestly enough, as persecuted apostles in heathendom; often interpreting as slights, neglect, and malignant opposition what had no such real intent. At all events this was the situation in 1880. And such, in a modified degree, it remains, after the growing mutual understanding of the past ten years.

But meanwhile the more thoughtful educational and religious public at the North has learned to put a more sober estimate on the accounts of this work by its immediate workers; while direct opposition and unfriendly feeling in the South has gradually subsided, with a decided movement in State and church among the Southern people for building up institutions of the same grade for the same object. Indeed, several of the more important of these great seminaries are already under a mixed management of Northern and Southern trustees, or subsidized by the States or communities in which they are established.

LVI.

But the radical problem still remained unsolved. How should I account for the condition in which the better sort of these students presented themselves at these schools, or even for the singular aptitude of considerable numbers who came up from the most unpromising surroundings? One reasonable explanation could only be found; the previous training of the colored people through their generations of servi tude, especially by the Southern women and the clergy.

Whatever may have been the original aptitudes or disabilities of the native African, three centuries ago in his home beyond the sea, and whatever of truth there may be in the enthusiastic estimate of his capabilities for all sorts of excellence by some of his new teachers, this factor must come, as a large element of the situation, as I first observed it, in the year 1880. Any race, in circumstances similar to the colored people previous to 1860, finds a way of concealing its higher aspirations and develops the habits essential to making a comfortable estate of an inev itable system of bondage. The friendly Northern and European man, especially the woman, does understand the upper side of the Negro nature as it can hardly be divined, even by the most faithful worker for his uplifting of Southern birth and association. Still, the lower side of this people is best known through long and troublesome expe

rience in the communities of which they are a vital part. Unhappily, the average Southern white man and woman have become so accus tomed to the "often infirmities" of the "brother in black" that the suggestion of a common human nature is somewhat of a strain upon the imagination and the story of his actual advancement, under the educational discipline of freedom, is apt to be rejected as a delusion or resented as an affront upon the superior race. On the other hand it is almost impossible for the Northern man of British descent to conceive the possibility of any growth toward the higher estate of manhood in such a condition of chattel bondage as enveloped the colored race previous to the civil war.

But a little exercise of the reason and that interpretative imagination, without which logic is the champion liar and even experience the chronic misleader in human affairs, should long ere this have opened the eyes of fair-minded people to the indebtedness of the American Negro to this element in the schooling of his house of bondage. And when, as in my own case, an exceptional opportunity was offered for years to observe and work, in the confidence of all sides of Southern society, save an occasional jealous, conceited, or grumbling schoolmaster or a small editor spoiling for a Northern "head to hit," I should be unfaithful to our American civilization in all its varied constituents did I not bear hearty testimony to the great work of preparation on the old Southern plantation for the new schoolhouse imported from the North.

LVII.

Here is a great estate in the heart of a wide country, connected with others, great and small, by broad spaces of partially occupied lands. The family in possession stands to its working class in a relation more nearly resembling the patriachal family of the Oriental world than is elsewhere possible. If of the superior class, it is a group of people educated by the usual methods of the secondary and higher academical and college training of half a century ago, possibly one or two members improved by travel and graduation from Northern or European schools. But, whatever may be the attraction abroad, the home life offers the one quality that appeals most strongly to the educated man and woman; the opportunity for the exercise of an almost absolute power and an influence practically irresistable. The men of the household, if ambi tious and able, represent at home and abroad the most powerful aristocratic class in Christendom. The women of similar qualifications are received at the National Capital as social magnates and pass for their full worth as guests, even in portions of the country in a growing political hostility to their own.

But the mass of good women in any country are not magnates of fashion; rather home-keepers, careful mothers of children, good managers of the domestic environment. And here is the center of the mar velous power exerted by the Southern woman of the better sort through