tendom, that its armies even without the help of the Negro and the loyal mountaineers held at bay for four years the tremendous power of our Government and enlisted the sympathy of the greatest empire on the globe, and how soon that people has risen above a complete overthrow of its old order of society, we may begin to estimate what the South will be when within the life of most of us here it will become practically "solid" for the new education and swing into its place in the grand onward movement for the republic that is to come.

But there is a work in this majestic enterprise which can be done by the school public and people of the North, which every consideration of patriotism, Christian brotherhood, and common justice loudly commands us to undertake. If we fail to do it, the South will not fail, at the end of weary years and prolonged bitterness of soul, to work out its salvation. But if we now come to the front and cheerfully and wisely do our part, the good time prayed for will come so soon that we shall be compelled to locate a national asylum for sectional politicians, reduced agitators, and the whole crowd of national buzzards who flourish on fields strewn with the corpses of the noblest and the loveliest of the land. Let me briefly sketch the outline of this field of operation as it lays outspread before me after a year's observation and travel between the Potomac and the Rio Grande.

First of all, the Northern school public and people can help the South to train its teachers for the work so swiftly crowding upon them. Nowhere is it so important that public and private schools should be taught at once by the best methods and organized according to the best models as there. A Southern country school, from two to four months long, fumbled over by an old schoolmaster "gone to seed,” or fretted by a nervous school mistress who has not gone beyond the methods of the "blue-back spelling book," only breeds mischief with the children and despair in every parent endowed with common sense. Especially among the Negroes and the ignorant whites must the schoolmistress be able to stand her ground and insist on making her school a vital reality. A three months' school session, in which the children are thoroughly aroused and trained to gather knowledge for themselves, is a better education than a college term of ten months, where the soul of the student is overlaid by the stupidity of a professor whose teaching faculty was never born. A body of thorough teachers for the next generation means everything in Southern schoolkeeping. A good teacher can educate children under a tree, behind a stone wall, in the swamps of the Teche country with alligators "on the rampage" and moccasins for object lessons, can inspire the children, wake up the parents, "create a soul under the ribs" of the deadest county superintendent, and make the dreariest wilderness of ignorance blossom like the rose. The Peabody education fund has done wisely in concentrating itself on the training of teachers, but its gift is only a little rill flowing into a mighty hollow among the hills.

This work so far has been largely done for colored teachers by the great mission schools established by Northern funds and worked by Northern instructors. There are probably a hundred institutions of this kind, supported by religious denominations, or by private benevolence, where large numbers of superior colored youth are more or less qualified for instructing in the public schools. The best of these seminaries should, at once, be enlarged, munificently endowed, sifted in their teaching force, which should have a fair proportion of Southern-born teachers, placed more largely than now under the management of wise native trustees, while in each should be established a powerful professorship of the best methods of primary instruction. Thus enlarged, there is little doubt that, with reasonable safeguards against sectarian propagandism, they might claim State or national aid, as now, in several cases, they do receive. The South can not hope to establish colored normal schools to rival these and the union of North and South in their development would only be productive of the happiest result.

Indeed the arrangements for the normal training of Southern white teachers are at present far below the opportunities for the Negroes. There are not a half dozen gen

uine normal or training schools for white teachers in the whole South. The mass of these teachers are graduates of public, academical, or collegiate establishments, often taught by obsolete methods and not pretending to deal with didactics as a distinct science and art. No gift of money would now tell so quickly on Southern education as a contribution that would support in every State a dozen centers of normal instruction, or put into a score of high schools and academies an expert in the art of teaching. If the three million dollars for which Harvard College is said to be dying could be hurried up, and another three millions, within five years, planted in this way for the training of white teachers for our Southern common schools, every American university would vibrate with a new life, and American society would feel an electric thrill to its finger ends. To talk about the higher education, with the public school system in its cradle, is like an order for ship timber upon a country bare as the bald pate of a professor who never dreamed that the people must build the American university. It is the bright boys and girls that are waked up in the log schoolhouses and stung into insatiable longing for wisdom in the little cross-roads academies that will crowd the halls of the Vanderbilts, and lift up the drooping heads of the despairing colleges of the South. The first need of Southern schooling is that thousands of these splendid young people (no better anywhere) should be trained in the best methods of instruction. Then the public school system can be put on the ground and will fight its way to certain victory sooner than any of us believe it possible.

I speak of this home training of Southern youth for teachers because it is both impossible and impolitic, if possible, that Southern children in any large degree should be taught by teachers from the North. Our superior teachers can not afford to work under the disadvantages of a strange climate for the wages there paid. They do not understand the situation and can not handle the children in any such way as teachers reared in the locality. There is plenty of the very best material for teachers at home who need occupation and will be more deeply interested in the schools than strangers can be. Of course the North will be drawn upon for experts in this work of training teachers. Our Western cities welcome Southern girls of ability as instructors, and Harvard has just called a Southern professor to an important chair. Our friends in the South must keep open doors for such of our superior teachers as naturally drift their way. But no American State or community ought to rest till it raises its own teachers for its own public schools. O, if one-half the money that will be wasted in senseless luxury at Northern watering places during this summer could find its way to a thousand centers of education in the land now blazing with fierce sunshine, what a new and blessed life might be born out of this marriage of soul and gold for the uplifting of the nation and the glory of Almighty God.

It is true this development of Southern education under its own teachers may result in some changes there in the Northern regulation type of school. But I do not regard this an evil to be deplored. There is but one essential principle in American education; that a highway shall be opened from every man's doorstep to the summit of American life and every child shall be invited to walk therein and, if need be, assisted by the State, provided his education is a genuine walking in the common highway to wisdom and not a pretentious "cutting across lots" to earn the prize while shirking the toil. Any State that attempts to fence up any portion of its people so that it is practically impossible for its children to aspire to the best things, has violated the radical American idea of a school. But, this condition assured, I believe it only foolishness to insist that the Southern people shall imitate the schools of the North any farther than these schools are proved best for the locality. The beauty of our public school is that it accommodates itself so easily to the needs of a community. The fine adjustments of the city graded school are absurdly out of place in the red schoolhouse in the country. A teacher at Leadville, with a mixed multitude of all tribes and tongues on the benches, must cover more ground than the mistress of a crowd of children gathered from good families in an old Eastern town. What an absurdity is the long-drawn argument for "purely secular instruction" to

a teacher of 50 Negro children on a Louisiana plantation; a moral cypress swamp of rank vegetation, gaudy flowers, poisonous snakes, and without perceptible bottom; demanding that nine lessons out of every ten should be a search for a moral and religious hardpan without which knowledge is a curse and mental sharpness the devil in paradise. It will be impossible, for years, for the South to develop the country district school after the type of the crowded farm country of Connecticut, or to work up that elaborate system of secondary education which from the first has been the special glory of Massachusetts; or to a dozen things which pedants in the school room declare absolutely necessary to "a thorough education."

Our Northern school public must understand that the Southern schools must be in many ways different from ours, if their children are to be as well educated as our own. I believe this independence of management will foster vigor and originality.

There has been no broader thinker on education in America than Thomas Jefferson. His ideas of an unsectarian religious university with an elective curriculum, supported partially or wholly by the State, have prevailed everywhere west of the Hudson and will finally conquer a place in the most stubborn New England State. His plan for a free school organization in Virginia, with some adaptations, is still the best for the South, and after a hundred years new Virginia is doing for the Negroes, at Hampton, what Jefferson advised at the close of the Revolution. We should encourage our friends in the South not in any superficial, sectional, or sectarian conceit of schoolkeeping, but in every wise effort to adapt the great settled principles of education to the actual necessities of their peculiar life. If we do that the time will come when the South may give to the North as many valuable methods as the West has already given to the East, and every State of the Union develop some beautiful variety in the national university-the public school.

The good work of building up the university life of the South and of reinstating the secondary preparatory schools for its colleges by Northern donations of money has already begun. Peabody, Vanderbilt, Corcoran, Hopkins, Brooks, and Seeney are all household names with the young men of the South, and it is greatly to be hoped that this good work of patriotism and philanthropy will gather strength with the growing years.

I have never believed in the policy of building up a few overshadowing university corporations in our country to the neglect of that class of respectable colleges that meets the wants of the great majority of our young men. There is one thing more important than profound scholarship in America, and that is a broad and lofty type of national manhood. Since the day when George Washington, at the age of 40, educated by the frontier life of provincial Virginia, drew his sword under the elms of old Harvard College as commander-in-chief of the armies of the thirteen revolting colonies, the most illustrious names in American statesmanship, literature, arms, and arts have not been the graduates of the few greater universities in sufficient proportion to warrant the lofty educational airs sometimes put on by their over-zealous friends. So far "the weight of the meeting" has been on the side of the smaller colleges and the open university of American life and "the scholar in politics," if that means the doctrinaire professor, is only thus far a lecture-room success. This does not imply that eminent scholarship is not an eminent good; only that it is an open question what style of training in this Republic turns out eminence of any sort so often as to justify the pretensions of any to educational infallibility. At any rate the South now needs the endowment of many good academical and collegiate schools which, at a reasonable rate of tuition, can give its young men a thorough start, far more than millions poured into one of its universities. Young men are greatly educated by noble men in college chairs rather than by narrow experts trying to maneuver a realm of science, like a little spitfire of a steam tug floating a great, sluggish raft from St. Paul down to the Gulf.

Especially do the superior young women of the South demand the most earnest interest in all who have money to give for the thorough academical and collegiate

education of Southern youth. I think they are just now more eager for the higher education than their brothers, who are tempted by the brilliant prizes of secular life. The opportunities for them, with a very few exceptions, do not compare with those enjoyed by young men, and coeducation does not seem to be the fancy of the Southern people. It would be a national blessing if a hundred wealthy women or wives of rich men would each adopt some worthy school for girls in the South and endow it, with only the conditions that a genuine educational training of the higher academical sort should be furnished at the most moderate cost, with scholarships for meritorious girls with slender resources. And I am confident that in due time the wise millionaire will be found to plant at Atlanta, the gate city of the mighty Southwest, a Southern Wellesley, Smith, or Vassar, administered by a corporation that shall represent the whole country and both sexes; its lady president chosen from that group of admirable Southern women who are now toiling to lift up the scholarship of Southern girls, furnished with everything needful, without a flaw of sham education from its foundation stone to the weather cock on its tallest spire; so well endowed that for $200 a year a thousand students may throng its corridors and no good girl because of her poverty be left out in the cold. And along with this endowment of colleges the wealthy people of Southern birth now living in Northern cities might plant in many a city or county town a good library, with funds for lectures on topics of general culture, both of which are needed beyond measure in every State of the South.

It has been said that the railroad is the first university of a new country. I found the whole southwest in a fever of railroad building and its mountain slopes throbbing with a strange excitement of mining and manufacturing life. Every great planter or intelligent farmer I talked with was bewailing the low state of agriculture. Every wise observer of its new city life was asking for somethimg for the rising generation of white and colored youth to do. Industrial education is a necessity in the North, but it is the life blood of society through every State of the South. The railroad kings, the manufacturing princes, and the great merchants of the whole country should back the General and State Governments in munificent provisions for the thorough training of Southern blacks and whites in skilled labor around the whole circle of American industry. Without it the Negro will be shut out from mechanical employments and kept as a tenant or a farm hand, to his own injury and the incalculable harm of the South itself. Without it the poor white man will remain a poor fellow, while every post of lucrative labor will be seized by adventurous emigrants from foreign lands or more favored States. By the help of the National Government, which should be given at once in the most effective way, the Southern people can be left to establish the common school, first for the elementary and, in time, for the secondary training of all its children. But this most imperious necessity of endowments for industrial education should be met at once by that numerous class who are growing in wealth by their connection with Southern industrial life.

It may seem a little absurd for me, an humble minister of education, whose daily bread, for a year past, has been the kindly contribution that has enabled him to preach the gospel of light up and down the land, to be talking in this large way about money to a convention of teachers, most of whom have probably thought twice before facing the small expenses of this annual gathering of the American Institute of Instruction. But civilization has always been and always will be in the hands of poor men who make bold to "speak up" and demand the largest things of men who have everything to give.

The real privilege of wealth in this new land is not with people who waste their thousands in ridiculous aping of the expensive follies of European fashion or wallowing in a slough of base and vulgar luxury of the home-made sort. It is with that numerous body of wealthy men and women whose splendid gifts have made our land already a wonder of Christian public spirit and the leader in the charities of the world.

8819--15

As I come North, after a six months' working through the South, I am amazed at the show of vast wealth, the universal comfort, and the brimming prosperity of all classes of the Northern people. Our foreign-born mechanics and operatives, who are now training under demagogues in trades unions, are better off than several millions of respectable people of native birth between Washington and San Antonio. I deplore the awful waste of Northern substance in senseless pleasure and sinful excess of meats and drinks and dress, to the infinite harm of Northern children and youth. I have no words to express my abomination for that loud and boastful crew who are trading in politics, running a wicked race for power and plunder, and maneuvering "the machine" as if they wielded the destinies of mighty States. If our great statesmen have no occupation more honorable than throwing political fireballs and hand-grenades, showing up the foulness of each other's rival barbarisms and branding each other with sectional and partisan nicknames, in heaven's name let them come home and leave the Capitol for one session to the people who are praying and working for the children that even now are the expectant heirs of the world's great Republic. The glory of American statesmanship is to deal decisively with new issues as they arise, and "leave the dead to bury their dead" while following the Lord into the kingdom of heaven materialized in this new world.

As I rode, last April, over the flowery prairies of Texas, I saw all along the road the carcasses of horses and cattle and sheep, starved in the past awful winter. But I did not see even the most stupid cowboy down in the mud trying to blow the breath of life into the nostrils of these dead creatures that cumbered the ground. Even he knew well enough that the thing for him to do was to bridle the frisky colts, break in the stubborn little mules, and fold the tender lambs in his arms. These moldering skeletons, if let alone, would be fleshed by carrion birds, ground into compost, or trodden into the ground. Other springs would awaken them into new life and they would reappear, not in ghastly shapes of slaughtered hecatombs, but in a new and glorious birth of foliage and flowers, blue and scarlet and pink and tender green and cloth of gold, in the light and warmth of the kindling sunshine, shimmering out to the dim horizon line. O! friends of South and North, have we not already lived long enough amid the tombs, chanting "the doleful sound" of sectional hatred,, bewailing the follies and sins of the past, perpetuating the wreck of fratricidal war? Now let us awake, for it is sun-up on the morning hills of the Republic; "work while the day lasts," and, when for us "cometh the night, in which no man can work," pass on and up to our better task beyond the shining shore, leaving behind a Young America trained for the glorious destiny that beckons from the heights to the generation now at school.