tem, and, under the principalship of Miss Lucy Moten, a remarkable young woman, educated in the Salem (Mass.) Normal School, sustains its high reputation and supplies the colored schools of the city with their teachers.

The Magruder school building is used largely as the practice department for this school, and I have rarely seen better primary work anywhere, with more suggestive and satisfactory results in scholarship, deportment, drawing, and the industrial work usually attempted by children of these years, than can be seen there at any time by any visitor. In these Washington schools, by their payment of good wages and favorable conditions, has been gathered a group of excellent colored teachers and admirable women. Many of them have been educated in the normal schools of the North as well as at home. They are not only good teachers, but women of high character and personal refinement, known and esteemed at home and abroad.

The great mission colleges, especially the Hampton Normal Institute and similar institutions established by the Southern States, are rapidly increasing this class of excellent colored women teachers. As the young educated men of the race improve their opening industrial opportuni ties, the call for young women will increase until they will become the majority, as in the schools for white children and youth. As it is, their work is even more radical and essential to the future of their people than that of any other class. As teachers in the common and the Sunday school, leaders of the women in the churches, wives of the clergymen and other educated men, influential through their knowledge of industrial matters, especially valuable in the reform and uplifting in the home life of their people, their work and worth can not be overestimated. For only as the home of the Southern Negro is built on the solid foundatious of chastity, temperance, intelligent industry, and all the qualities that make for Christian womanhood, is there any rational hope for the permanent advancement of the race. What this sisterhood of noble young women should now have is the sympathy, wise coöperation, and material aid of the Christian women of the South, for the results of what they are doing are already felt, and more and more will prevail in every Southern home.

CXXI.

Thus have I attempted, of necessity in a manner sketchy and bounded a good deal by my own personal observation as the interpreter of all I have read and heard of Southern education, to give the outlines of my own estimate of the educational situation of the South, as concerns especially the elementary and secondary schooling of its children and youth, and, as the title of my essay indicates, with particular reference to the heart of the matter: the direct and indirect influence of "Southern women in the recent educational movement of the South." I anticipate that in laying such emphasis upon the woman side of the matter 8819-12

I go beyond the estimate of the more conservative view of many of the most esteemed educators of these States. But I can see no reason for believing that the trend of educational thought and development is essentially different in this from the other portions of the Union. There, as everywhere in our country, I find the nobler class of young women moved by the common desire for a broader culture and a more intimate acquaintance with the class of studies that touch on the conduct of life, with an irrepressible ambition to do their part in the new industrial and professional openings to their sex. And above all do I mark the zeal, energy, and ability with which they have responded to the call of their people for service in the schoolroom. Great numbers of them, far greater than is understood at home, are now domiciled in our Northern cities, doing what is not called for, perhaps not heartily approved in their own neighborhoods. But the time is rapidly passing when any capable and worthy Southern girl will be compelled to leave her own section to find a sphere for any honorable pursuit, either for breadwinning or the higher dispensation of the bread of life to hungry souls. There is not an important educational position in the South to day that is not somewhere well filled by a woman. And her success makes her not only an "object lesson " for thousands of ambitious girls, but the pride of the community. The leading women teachers of the South are already a conspicuous figure in Southern society, as seen from outside; and, with their literary and artistic sisterhood, they are coming to occupy the place of the Southern woman of society of a generation ago.

CXXII.

It was my original intention to follow out these suggestive lines of development in the recent educational movement in the South by a sketch of their logical bearing upon much that I see in the industrial, literary, artistic, social, moral reform, and religious life of these States. Happily for the permanent civilization of this section, the Southern woman of to-day, by her intense and pathetic reminders of the past and the prodigious power of public opinion, is held to a more gradual and conservative evolution of her coming estate than her sister either in the new and limitless West or the free aud cultured East. But she is moving on the same lines as the great influential superior class of women in the North, who are not always represented by the leaders of the radical so-called "woman's movement," though ready to secure every right, fill every position, and use every opportunity that the "sober second thought" and Christian common sense of American womanhood will demand. As fast as that demand becomes articulate and fairly representative of the foremost American womanhood it will be received and granted by the American people, as it has been during the past half century. Neither a reluctant Southern manhood, local theories, nor the exigencies of Southern society will do more than retard the corresponding woman's movement in these sixteen States.

It is not necessary, just now, to explore these widely diverging lines, which, like the railroad tracks of a great prairie city, spread themselves onward and outward, till they dwindle and fail in a far-off horizon. There is far too much obstinate theorizing, vague prophecy, and loud and boastful proclamatiou now for the good of the Southern people. What the peculiar type (as Mr. Breckinridge says, "the provincial flavor") of the coming Southern manhood and womanhood is to be; how far even the best characteristics of the old aristocratic order are to be reproduced, exalted, and glorified in the democratic order which is now so rapidly materializing; whether the approaching wealth, as in the North, is to be educated and directed into that large and beneficent giving, for the upper side of life, which is the glory of American civilization, the coarse and brutal insensibility to which fact declares the majority of the leaders of the so-called "labor movement" not only incompetents in business and "shriekers" in politics, but vulgar and second-rate in their general estimate of human society; or whether, for a generation, the lower and more hateful results of new accumulation are to inflict on these communities a dispensation of shoddy, selfishness, and dishonesty, provoking, as even now seems to be threat ened, an uprising of the "plain people" to overthrow all established laws of financial development, with down-rushing political chaos beyond-it is not profitable here to inquire. The noblest heart and mind of the South is to-day laboring with these problems. Such a deliverance as that which comes to us in the commencement address of President William Preston Johnston, of Tulane University, New Orleans, before the University of Alabama, in July, 1891, is a landmark toward the future in which all true Americans may unite.

CXXIII.

But one duty appears to me, above all others, imperative upon the educational public of these Southern States-in every way possible in their present circumstances, by the acceptance of every honorable gift, by the coöperation of the home, the church, and the State, to give to the present generation of Southern girls the full educational opportunity of our present American life. No enlightened man certainly will disparage the importance of all that is being done for the higher training of Southern boys. The only regret is that the insanity of materialism and the supposed necessities of common life are driving so many of them away from the opportunities now at hand. In the higher grades of the excellent public grammar schools of Atlanta, Ga., a representative industrial Southern city, I found room after room with a little group of a dozen boys or less to a swarm of girls, and the boys' high school, not one-third as large as the girls' high school, established by Supt. Mallon and presided over for years by the queenly grace and culture of Laura Haygood. In another more populous city I found but 2 boys and 200

girls in its coeducational high school. Indeed, up to the actual college age the girls, from the age of 10 to 18, are already in overwhelming majority in the Southern schoolroom wherever I go. But even here a great deal more should be done, and can be done, for the betterment of the education of these girls.

It is of the first importance that a more thorough system of training teachers, especially for elementary school work, should be at once established. I do not know of half a dozen genuine city training schools for teachers south of Washington. It is simply a blunder, almost "an outrage," to thrust a young girl, even a high school or "female college" graduate, with no knowledge even that there is a science and art of education, perhaps not a month's experience in caring for children, into one of these swarming primary schoolrooms in the cities, or into the jungle that the average ungraded country school must be. The conceit of certain "great educators," male or female, that the girl graduate, even from Vassar, is competent without training to teach school, is fast becoming the champion educational heresy of the time. And of all countries in the world the South is the place where a thorough system of normal training in the natural methods of school keeping is most important. A few thousand dollars extra in any one of twenty Southern cities thus wisely expended would increase the value of their schools beyond measure, and only thus can a permanent class of reliable teachers be developed. The State normal schools are too few to supply the demand, and the brief summer institutes only deal with teachers often confirmed in bad habits. Every important school for girls in the South and every graded school should make this a prominent department and work it with all the vigor possible.

CXXIV.

Outside of Washington and two or three special State schools I am not aware of any important movement in the South to make industrial training, even of an elementary type, a prominent element in the schooling of white girls. This important department of modern schoolkeeping is far better organized and more liberally dispensed to the colored than to the white girls of the South. Nobody disputes the necessity of doing all things possible to qualify the average colored schoolgirl for the inevitable duties of her lot, and everybody knows the melancholy failure of that dangerous "little learning" which leaves her a victim to laziness and a candidate for ruin. But there are hundreds of thousands of young white women in the South looking with a mighty longing for that training in some one of the 346 bread-winning occupations now in the busy hands of their Northern sisters. It is little less than sheer cruelty and heartless selfishness, though veneered with eloquent sentimentality, to keep these good girls adrift outside the pale, beating about in unskilled work, till forced by public sentiment into

a hasty, early marriage, in its outcome an evil more fatal even than the free divorce of the North. The Southern woman of to-day, outside the frivolous class, desires to work. But she also desires and has the right to demand that she shall be taught those improved methods of work which, perhaps, more than anything fix the character of society and the estimate of genuine refinement. The "conservatism" that denies this is simply a back-water slough of reactionary despond, in which no progressive Southern community will long be content.

CXXV.

We repeat, what has been said before, that the time has come in the South, as elsewhere, when the silly American habit of calling even second-rate common things by uncommon names should be discountenanced, nowhere more sternly than in the higher education of young women. The showy, expensive, and misleading parade of young girl graduates of high and academic schools, trained to enact a gorgeous spectacle which is an educational sham if not a farce, amid the hurrahs of crowded opera houses, the adulation of friends, and the sickening glorification of the local press, is the most discouraging element in the movement for the higher education of young women. It makes one even respect the obstinate command of tough old Gen. Hill that the girls in the University of Arkansas should dress in checked gowns and sunbonnets. The very name and catalogue of many of these academies for girls is, in itself, the most forcible argument for a severe and relentless "new departure" towards the upper story of an education that is of the higher sort in something beside a "thundering in the index" and an overgrown printed course of study. At various points in the South, as we have before indicated, this reform is stirring in the minds of the real leaders of education, making sensible people disgusted with the boastful comparison of poor and superficial with genuine schools, every year bringing to the front a larger number of resolute girls who will either get what they want at home or find it elsewhere, and giving a pathetic force to the appeals, almost heartbreaking in their intensity, of the noblest teachers for the means of establishing the real woman's college and university as it is now understood in the great educational centers of every country.

And these things must be given, and given as speedily as may be, to furnish the young women of the South for the imperative demands of the present. They must be given with the expectation of meeting the logical result of "the woman's movement" for higher culture as the years go on. Surely the men of the South, who have filled the world with the praise of their womankind in the past, and to-day insist, sometimes even with heat and violence, that the society made by her in the old time was the best upon earth, will not bely their own faith by the unmanly fear that the broadest and loftiest education approved by