For the most notable outcome of the great war of redemption in the South has been the emancipation of woman from the European to the American relation to society. During the four years of conflict she garnered up her powers and trained herself to a new leadership in practical life. She was the moving spirit in the revival of education in its secondary and higher departments for girls. During the ten troubled years that followed the coming of peace, in the home, the private, and the new common schools, she blazed a way out of the woods towards the open country of universal education. To-day she is in possession of, probably, the majority of positions, and does three-fourths of the val uable teaching in the common schools for white people. Everywhere, at home and in the neighboring States, she is pushing in at every open opportunity; ringing the bell and banging "the knocker on the big front door" locked on the inside. The coming ten years will record her victory. In placing in her hands, to as great an extent as even in New England, the affairs of administration and instruction in the people's common school, and in opening to her, as freely as in the West, admission to every realm of the higher education, the men of the South will give the best proof of the reality of that chivalric estimation of their own womanhood which is their boast. Chivalry, in its American acceptation, is simply the Master's golden rule every where applied in life. To-day the country awaits, with "great expectations," the final demonstration of the higher civilization by the New South, by placing in the hands of its good women the education of its younger children, with equal opportunity for study and service through the whole upper story of the secondary and higher culture, from the plantation primary to the University of Virginia. CXVI. No feature of the new Southern common school is more burdened with far-reaching consequences than the department established and supported for the benefit of more than 1,000,000 children and youth of the colored people. It would greatly clear up the Southern situation if two sets of people, both doubtless honest in their convictions, would take themselves outside of preconceived theories, in which they are wandering as in a Florida everglade, with no practical outcome, and the only possible result new complications in the future. The first class is a considerable portion of the Southern white people, especially in the rural districts, who either question the value of education to the Negro laborer or protest against the "injustice" of educating him in free schools supported, as they are very largely, by the taxation of the white race. While no Southern State save two, we believe, has been persuaded by this party to refuse to be taxed for the support of at least the elementary common school for all children, yet in more than one State a movement has been inaugurated to return to the system abandoned by Kentucky, of setting apart the whole taxation of these people for their own use, or in some way withdrawing the aid of the white people. In one State a law of this kind was defeated by the decision of the courts. In every State there is enough of this agitation to alarm and exasperate the colored folk and at once play into the hands of the colored churches, many of whose clergy are trying to establish the parochial sectarian school system, and stimulate the sectional spirit which all good people in the country deplore. For in the first place if anything is demonstrated amid the confusion of tongues that rages around "the labor question," it is that intelligent labor in the masses, organized and guided by the skilled labor of experts, is the only method by which any American State can develop its resources and build itself up into the varied type of industry characteristic of Republican institutions. The most serious burden upon labor to-day in our country is the illiteracy, incompetence, and general handto-mouth style of working and living in which millions of our countrymen still flounder. The man who asserts that the seven millions of our colored citizens are worse off for their education for the past twentyfive years, either does not know what he is talking about, or does know exactly that the logic of his contention leads back to slavery, or a condition so little removed therefrom that any State in which it prevails may as well make its "last will and testament," and prepare to disappear from the fellowship of civilized communities within the coming generation. The only cure of the present defects of negro education is more schooling of a better kind, solid elementary instruction six months in the year, with industrial training by a class of teachers reliable as moral guides no less than competent as instructors in letters. The secondary and higher education of these people, outside what the State can afford, is now well cared for in the great mission schools. In proportion as the Southern people do their duty the North may be relied upon to help, and Congress will respond to any practicable system of national aid acceptable to the educational public of the South. The "injustice" complained of is a part of the American common. school system whereby the State of Massachusetts, perhaps by a third of her population, taxes itself $8,000,000 yearly, paying $20 a head to educate her 400,000 school children, 90 per cent of whom are given the advantages of a free high school, with unlimited years for attendance, beside a score of good normal schools with free tuition for teachers, and such facilities for good reading as are enjoyed nowhere else. The American idea is that the property of the State shall educate its children, aud the denial of this fundamental principle would precipitate a "labor agitation" compared with which the disturbance of to-day is a summer's breeze to a cyclone. Not only justice, but every consideration, indus trial, social, political, and religious, points to universal education as the bottom question in every American State, the neglect of which unsettles everything, the wise handling of which will settle all things aright, with persistence, patience, patriotism, and God's providence as irresistible allies. CXVII. On the other hand, a portion of the educated colored people and their Northern friends do great injustice to the Southern educational public, which, in establishing and supporting the common school for the Negro now these twenty years, defending it against its enemies and making it somewhat better every year, deserves the approbation of the Republic and especially the hearty coöperation of the colored citizens and their sensible friends. The separation of colored from white children in schooling is simply inevitable, and, like all inevitable conditions, has great advantages in the present condition of the race. Only in separate schools can the children of these people acquire the entire circle of personal qualities which make the self-reliant citizen, be protected from unfavorable associations, and be schooled in the ways best adapted to the first generation of a race that has received education through the medium of letters. Besides, the coeducation of the races in the South would practically deprive the superior class of young colored people of their most valuable opportunity at presenttheir leadership in the common-school training of 1,000,000 colored children-by all odds the most important professional work now open to them, including, as it so often does, the building up of an intelligent and reliable ministry, and the improvement of the Sunday school in the colored churches. I am often discouraged by what seems to me a failure to appreciate the present opportunities of the younger third of the Negro people by a considerable portion of their educated class who persist in looking at the general situation through the clouded spectacles of their own peculiar disabilities. Every wise and good man deplores these disabilities, and labors for their gradual removal. But too many of this class fail to appreciate the fact that to-day no set of educated young people in Christendom has such an opportunity as themselves in the mental, moral, religious, and social leadership of 7,000,000 people-a nation within a nation-so intimately inwrought into the very texture of civilization in one third our American States that not only their welfare but that of the Republic is largely dependent upon the outcome. Every consideration, not only the highest, but wise expediency, personal concern, and common sense, now implores the more favored class of this people to put out of mind everything that will conflict with the practical work on hand. That work is, within a generation, to bring the younger third of this great population to such an industrial, mental, moral, and social state of fitness for full American citizenship that no State will either dare or desire to withhold from it all legal protection in the common civil rights accorded to the whole. While national legislation may do somewhat, Northern sympathy more, and a growing conviction of both civic and Christian obligation among the Southern people most of all, it should be understood plainly that this result depends more on the consecrated labor and the intelligent, firm, and conciliatory attitude of perhaps a hundred thousand educated and able men and women of that race than upon all other influences combined. CXVIII. And no division of this leading class now occupies such a post of vantage as the teachers in the common schools for the colored people. There are now 23,000 of them, and their number is constantly increas ing, through the enlarging opportunities of the great mission schools and the system of normal instruction now supported in every Southern State. It only needs a larger body of competent people to open every public colored schoolhouse door in the South to teachers of this race, with increasing opportunity in the seminaries for higher instruction established by the North. At present the men are in a considerable majority in this work, partly because a larger proportion of young men are competent and because the superior class of the younger colored clergy often combine teaching with the ministry. The more intelligent young men too often are making the serious mistake of crowding the few professions open to them, or througing the cities and the National Capital for office work, instead of following the example of great numbers of educated white men in looking to the various mechanical trades and industrial openings where they are especially needed, and where there still remains large opportunity for success. Many of these men are now invaluable, not only as teachers and preachers, but as general workers and leading citizens among their people. We here enforce again what has already been said-the unique opportunity and commanding position of the colored teacher in the Southern common school. There is no more pestilent nuisance in America than an ignorant, vicious, mischief making man or woman in this position, unless it be the "big-head" graduate of a colored university, contemptuous of labor, inflated with the "little brief authority" of the schoolroom, a social "masher," a political wire puller, and a general intermeddler and disturber of good feeling between the better classes of the community. But nowhere, in this or any other country, can a more valuable work be accomplished than by "the right man from Hampton, Fisk, Atlanta, or Tuskegee, "in the right place," his schoolroom, an office where he, the man of all good work, is building up his people in all good things. CXIX. And especially is the colored woman teacher-competent in acquirements, character, professional ability, religious consecration, womanly tact, and practical and patient industry-such a benediction to her people as nobody can understand, unless, like myself, he has seen, year after year, the development of this class of the colored teaching-body in the border cities and through all the Southern States. There are now probably 8,000 colored women teaching school, the great majority of them in the common schools. Of course, too many of them are every way incompetent and too few thoroughly qualified for this greatest of all sorts of American woman's work. But a larger number every year are doing better service, and a considerable class are so good that I never spend an hour in the schoolroom with one of them without feeling that the colored woman has a natural aptitude for teaching not yet half understood by her own people, but certain to make her a most pow erful influence in the future of both races in the South. For two hundred years the Negro woman has been the servant, nurse, "mammy" and "aunty" of the foremost Southern people, and with all her shortcomings, past and present, is still beloved by the children as no class in similar condition has ever been in our country. The most stubborn "Bourbon" statesman melts and talks like a Christian gentleman in praise of the good old sister in black who was more to his boyhood than even his profuse rhetoric can set forth. Here is the providential furnishing, in this native loving-kindness, unselfishness, endless patience, overflowing humor and sympathetic insight into child nature, for the office of the teacher, with the added qualifications of suitable education, moral stamina and the social refinement that come so easily to the educated colored woman. It is useless to argue this point with one who does not know what is now going on in the schoolrooms of the South; and there is no necessity for argument with any competent observer, after suitable observation. CXX. Thirty years ago, Myrtilla Miner, a northern schoolmistress, began the seemingly hopeless work of establishing a high school for free colored girls in the city of Washington, D. C. Her biography, now written, tells the pathetic and inspiring tale of her career in that city. At her death, she left a small property dedicated to the higher instruction of colored girls. A dozen years ago I first visited the Miner Normal School, then under the control of the directors of this fund, taught in a large building owned by the corporation, in connection with the public schools furnishing trained teachers for their use. The principal, Miss Briggs, a colored woman, born and educated in Massachusetts, was one of the most competent experts in this work I have ever known and, under her admirable management, the school made good progress. Her later years were passed in Howard University as professor of pedagogics, where she died in 1890, regretted by all who knew of her great work. By what seems to me an unwise and visionary policy, this fund was detached from the normal school and is now involved in an attempt at mission and industrial work in the city. But the normal school, thus established, is now supported as a part of the common-school sys |