“Just in these days,” Miss Graham continued, “we have had some terrible revelations of child-labour, at a certain place on the Gulf Coast, where more than 200 children, from nine years old upwards, are kept ‘shucking’ oysters for twelve hours a day, under the most horrible conditions, physical and moral. And the Law Committee of our S.P.C.C. reports that there is no remedy, because the factory law at present in force in Louisiana applies only to ‘cities or towns having a population of 10,000 or more;’ whereas this place is a little private inferno, owned by a single company and occupied solely by its serfs. But we are fighting a good fight for better laws and better conditions.”

My greatly condensed report of her conversation may lead the reader to mistake Miss Graham for a one-idea’d humanitarian. There could not be a greater error. She is an eminently practical, energetic, broad-minded young lady, with a keen sense of humour and an interest in many things outside the work to which she has devoted herself. I am sure the little children of New Orleans have in her not only a sincere but a very shrewd and efficient friend.

Miss Graham reported the relations between the white and coloured populations in New Orleans rather exceptionally good. The reason, I think, is not far to seek—namely, that the whites outnumber the blacks by about three to one. The acuteness of the problem in any given locality is apt to depend largely on the numerical proportions of the races.^[26]

On the New Orleans street-cars the two races are kept apart, but the discrimination is certainly made with the utmost urbanity. The rear-seats of each car are marked “For Coloured Patrons Only.”

Montgomery, the legislative capital of Alabama, has the air of a pleasant and prosperous country town, with spacious streets, for the most part well shaded with trees. Its dignified, unpretending State House—where the Confederate Government was organized in 1861, and where Jefferson Davis took the oath as President—is admirably situated at the top of a gradually sloping hill, and commands a fine view over the rich, pleasant country. The soil in this district (and, indeed, in many parts of Alabama and Georgia) is as red as that of South Devon, and has naturally imparted its tint to the swirling Alabama river, which, when I saw it, reminded me of the rivers through which Thomas the Rhymer rode in the old ballad:

I was much disappointed not to find at his Alabama home Mr. Edgar G. Murphy, whose book on “The Present South” proves him not only a humane and judicious thinker, but one of the most accomplished living writers of America. I take this opportunity of expressing my great indebtedness to his admirable work.

My most interesting experience in Montgomery was a long talk with an intelligent and prosperous negro tradesman, whom I shall call Mr. Albert Millard. |A Contented Negro.| Mr. Millard did not, on the whole, express serious dissatisfaction with the condition of his race in the neighbourhood, and was inclined to take a hopeful view of the situation in general. “It’s the low classes of both races,” said he, “that keep us down and keep friction up.”

“In labour matters,” he went on, “no galling colour-line is drawn. In the building trade, for example, there is a white union and a coloured union, with a superior council representing both races. On Labour Day they parade together until they come to a certain point. Then one body turns to the right and the other to the left, and they finish the celebration each in its own park.”

“I wonder,” I said, “whether that may not be a type and model in miniature for the general solution of the question.”

But Mr. Millard’s note changed when I got him on the administration of justice.

“No,” he said, “we do not get justice in the courts. A negro’s case gets no fair hearing; and he is far more severely punished than a white man for the same offence. I’ll give you a little instance of the sort of thing that happens. A coloured man whom I know—a decent, quiet fellow—used to work in a livery stable. The boss one day fell a-cursing him so furiously that the man couldn’t stand it, and said he’d just as soon quit. He went into a room to take off his overalls; the boss followed him, and, without more ado, hit him over the head with an iron crowbar and knocked him senseless. When the man recovered he got out a warrant against the boss; but, instead of listening to his case, the Recorder said he might be thankful his master hadn’t killed him, and the next time he appeared in that court he would be sent to the farm.”

“Sent to the farm?”

“That means fined a sum he couldn’t pay, and sent to work it out either on the State farm or under some private employer. Oh, the State makes a big profit in this way! Suppose a man is fined 20 dollars and costs—say 25 dollars altogether—his labour being credited to him at 50 cents a day, it takes him fifty days to work out his fine. But his labour is worth far more than 50 cents a day. Private employers pay the State 60 or 70 cents a day for each convict labourer, and provide his food as well; but he is credited only with 50 cents all the same.”

“And what are they employed in for the most part?”

“Oh, farming in general—cotton, corn, potatoes, some sugar-cane. The State has lots of stock. And then there are the truck gardens (market-gardens) and the coal-mines.”

“And do you mean to say that all magistrates behave like the Recorder you spoke of?”

“When the regular Recorder is away, they select the hardest of the aldermen to take his place. There is only one court in which we think we get justice, and that is the Federal Court.”

This is one of the few points on which there is little conflict of evidence—the negro, in the main, does not get justice in the courts of the South.^[28] |An Elective Magistracy.| The tone of the courts is exemplified in the pious peroration of the lawyer who exclaimed: “God forbid that a jury should ever convict a white man for killing a nigger who knocked his teeth down his throat!” Exceptions there are, no doubt; there are districts in which the negroes themselves report that they are equitably treated. But the rule is that in criminal cases a negro’s guilt is lightly assumed, and he is much more heavily punished than a white man would be for the same offence;^[29] while in civil cases justice may be done between black and black, but seldom between white and black.

It would seem, too, that as a rule the negro lawyer receives scant attention in the courts. Flagrant instances of this have been related to me—too flagrant, I hope, to be typical. It is pointed out, indeed, that while negro doctors are numbered by the thousand, negro lawyers (despite the argumentative and rhetorical nature of the race) are comparatively few. The reason alleged is that, though colour is no disqualification in the courts of nature, it practically disbars in the courts of men.

In the last analysis, this condition of affairs is no doubt a sort of automatic index of the state of public sentiment in the South. The average man does not greatly desire, or does not desire at all, that scrupulous justice should be done to the negro; and an elective magistracy—elected, as a rule, for short terms—simply mirrors this attitude of mind. A Recorder who held the scales even, as between the races, would quickly become unpopular with his electorate. He must record their judgments, or he will record no longer.

But there are special causes which tend to deflect the scale against the negro, and the chief of these is the system touched upon by Mr. Millard, which makes convict labour a source of profit to the State. |Profitable Crime.| No doubt white men as well as blacks are sentenced to the “chain-gang”; but it is much more natural and simple to send a negro than a white man into judicial slavery.^[30] Why let any pedantic rule of evidence or sentimental scruple of humanity deprive the commonwealth of a profitable serf? I find it alleged that in the year 1904 the State of Georgia made a clear profit of £45,000 out of “chain-gang” labour leased to private contractors. There is perhaps some mistake about this, since the average profit of the previous three years had been only £16,000 per annum. But even that sum is surely £16,000 too much.^[31]

One can understand the attractions of such a system, however unreal may be the gains that accrue to the Commonwealth. It is much less easy to understand another system, expounded to me by a leading white citizen of the State of Alabama, which makes it to the interest of magistrates and other officers of the law to promote litigation, and to keep the prisons full, because of the fees it brings them—so much for issuing a warrant, so much for filing it, so much for making an arrest, so much for maintenance in prison, etc. I do not understand this system well enough to attempt to explain it; but my informant declared that on one occasion, in his own town, a temporary magistrate, who was appointed during the serious illness of the regular occupant of the bench, found the prison “stacked up” with 500 negroes. Half of them were “held” on frivolous charges, which he simply dismissed; on the other half he imposed light fines which they could pay. “These iniquities,” my friend continued, “react upon us; they cost us money, and our gaols are breeders of crime and filth and disease. But our best people see it, and they’re going to correct it.”

While such systems prevail, it is manifest that statistics of negro crime must be carefully scrutinized and largely discounted before any value can be attached to them.^[32] |An Outlawed Race.| At the same time there is no doubt a considerable class of criminal negroes. It is natural, and indeed inevitable, that there should be. They are largely illiterate; they are for the most part poor; their white environment does all it can to lower rather than to stimulate their self-respect; the temptations of drink and drugs (mainly cocaine) beset them in many places; and when once a negro comes in conflict with the law, everything is done, not to reclaim him, but to harden him in crime. When we consider in how many respects the race is outlawed, it seems wonderful that more of them should not fall into habits of outlawry. No one can reasonably pretend, I think, that there is in the negro any innate and peculiar bent towards crime. Give him an equal chance, and he will show himself quite as ready as the white man to respect the criminal law at all events, if not, perhaps, the precepts of current morality. I cannot believe that any deep-rooted “original sin” in the African race is a serious element in the colour problem.

Meanwhile, by treating him with consistent and systematic injustice, the South is weakening and confusing her own case against the negro. In spite of many better impulses among the more enlightened of her people, her dominant instinct is to substitute for slavery a condition of serfdom. The black race is to have no indefeasible rights, but rather revocable licences to pretend to be freemen, so long as the pretence does not seriously interfere with the convenience or profit of the white race. And specially must the strictest limits be placed to the freeman’s right to work when and where he will, and even, if it suits him, to refrain from working. The South needs the negro’s labour, and is determined to have it, not on his terms, but on hers. Far more important and wide-reaching than the crime-slavery of the “chain-gang” is the system of debt-slavery or peonage, whereby a negro, becoming hopelessly indebted to a white landlord (and store-keeper), is compelled to spend the remainder of his life in working off a claim which can never be wiped out, because, for his very subsistence, he is forced to be ever renewing it. There is all the less chance of escape as accounts are kept by the landlord or his agent, and the negro is seldom in a position to check them. Until the law comes to the relief of the “peon,” and ceases to traffic in the sweat of the convict, the South, it seems to me, cannot look the negro squarely in the face.

Many Southerners, even the not unthoughtful or inhuman, make it the first and last word of their philosophy that “the nigger must be taught to know his place.” This means, on analysis, simply that he must accept his position as a serf. But no more than slavery, I take it, is serfdom permanently possible in a modern democratic State; and in so far as she fails to recognize this, the South is once more trying to put back the hands of Time.

It is very difficult to get at the true truth as to public education for the negro in the South. The probability is, in fact, that there are as many truths as there are points of view. One high authority (a negro) told me that for every single dollar expended on a black child about five dollars are expended on a white child. That is very likely true; but it is probably no less true that the sums expended on negro education are large out of all proportion to the sums paid by negroes in taxes. “Let us reduce their education to the scale of their taxation,” I have heard it said, “and where would they be?”^[33] The true question is: Where would the South be? Probably half-way back to barbarism.

But if we ask: Has the South neglected its plain duty towards the children of the freedmen? or has it heroically, in its poverty, devoted to the education of the black child money that could be ill spared from the beggarly education fund of the white child?^[34] we cannot rest content with the answer, “It depends on the point of view.” On the whole, I am inclined to believe that the favourable judgment is the true one; but I should hold it with greater confidence if there had not existed in the past, and did not survive to some degree in the present, a violent feeling against the very idea of negro education. In many places white teachers of black children are to this day ostracised.^[35] One may even say, I think, that, as a general rule, it takes some strength of mind for a white man or woman to follow the vocation of teaching negroes.

The hostility to negro education has, however, lost much of its former strength. |A Teacher of Negroes.| This is apparent from the case of Professor Patterson, head of an excellent State school for negroes in Montgomery. The Professor (a title as lightly accorded in the South as Major or Colonel) is a sturdy Scot. When he first came to the South in Reconstruction days chance led him to a county in the State of Alabama where there was, indeed, already a school, but it was kept by a negro who could neither read nor write. An educator by instinct, if not by training, Mr. Patterson determined to set up a school of his own. For this misdemeanour he was twice shot at, and was finally arrested, and put under a bond of 15,000 dollars to desist from teaching in that county. He went into another county, and started a school in the frame building that served as a negro church; but here the negroes themselves had to turn him out, as they were warned that if they did not the church would be burnt. These experiences only stiffened the professor’s backbone. He said: “I will teach—teach in Alabama—and teach negroes!” And here he is to-day, head of a fine large school in the State capital, and partially maintained by the State—a school well planned, well built, and with an excellent system of industrial training going on in various annexes in its spacious grounds.

As I passed through one of the senior school-rooms, a boy had just written on the blackboard, in a fine round hand, a quotation from a recent speech by Senator Foraker on the Brownsville affair—the affair of the negro regiment which President Roosevelt is alleged to have treated with high-handed injustice. The sentence ran: “We ask no favour for them because they are negroes, but justice for them because they are men.” Evidently there is no affectation of excluding from the schoolroom the all-absorbing problem.

Tuskegee (pronounced like Righi, but with the first “e” sound lengthened) is about forty miles from Montgomery, situated on an open rolling upland, with many small knolls and sudden gullies. In the course of a short drive from the station to the Institute, one passes a dignified old ante-bellum plantation-house, not without wondering what its owners of fifty years ago would have thought of the Tuskegee of to-day.

I am not going to attempt a minute description of “Booker Washington’s City,” as it has been called. It is, beyond all doubt, a wonderful place. Everywhere one sees the evidence of a great organizing capacity, a great inspiring force, a tireless, indomitable singleness of purpose—in short, a true magnanimity. I did not see Mr. Washington in his principality—I had met him some weeks earlier in the North—but the dominance of his spirit could perhaps be more clearly felt in his absence than in his presence.

Mrs. Washington I did see—a lady with the mien and manner of a somewhat dusky duchess. The observation may (or, rather, it does) seem an impertinence; but such impertinences are forced upon one by the very nature of the inquiry. Not only Mrs. Washington, but other members of the General Staff with whom I was brought in contact—for instance, Mr. Emmett J. Scott (Mr. Washington’s secretary) and Mr. Warren Logan (the treasurer of the Institute)—were far more Caucasian than African in feature, and very light in colour. Indeed, I saw no one in high position at Tuskegee who would not, with a very small lightening of hue, have been taken without question for a white man. I make the remark, however, without suggesting any deduction from it. I believe there is little evidence of any intellectual superiority of the mulatto (in all his various degrees) over the pure negro. It is often assumed as a matter of course; but those who have had the best opportunities for close comparison are quite unconvinced of it. One well-known white educator of the negro told me that for character, if not for intellect, he gave the pure black the preference over the mulatto.

Mr. J. Stevenson, who conducted me over the Institute, showed precisely the bright intelligence, the frank, unembarrassed courtesy, the quiet enthusiasm for his alma mater, which I should have expected in a senior “college boy” showing me the lions of Princeton or Cornell.

Tuskegee Institute is just twenty-seven years old. |Tuskegee.| It was opened in 1881 with one teacher (Mr. Washington) and thirty pupils. It had a grant of £400 a year from the Alabama Legislature; but it had no land and no buildings. Operations began in a dilapidated shanty and an old church, lent by the coloured people of the village.

It has now, or had two years ago, 2000 acres of land and 83 buildings, large and small. Its property, exclusive of endowment fund, is valued at about £170,000, and it has an endowment fund of a quarter of a million. It now accommodates about 1500 students, two-thirds of them male. More than 6000 students have passed through it, counting only those who have remained long enough to benefit appreciably by their course. Of these 6000 Mr. Washington declares that, after diligent inquiry (and every effort is made to keep in touch with former students), he cannot find a dozen who are not usefully employed; nor has one Tuskegee graduate been convicted of crime.

Instruction is given in thirty-seven industries, from agriculture and stock-breeding to printing and electrical engineering. Mr. Stevenson took me through the machine-room, the blacksmithing and carpentering, carriage-building, harness-making, tailoring, and shoemaking departments, the departments of agricultural chemistry, and of mechanical and architectural drawing. Mrs. Washington herself was good enough to be my guide through the women’s building (known as Dorothy Hall), with its departments of plain sewing, dressmaking and millinery, mattress-making, broom-making, basket-weaving, laundry-work, and cookery, and its model dining-rooms and parlours, furnished, arranged, and decorated by the students themselves. Everywhere I saw earnest work in progress, everywhere order, discipline, and thorough scientific method. All this had been made possible, no doubt, by white money; but the whole organization and conduct of the Institute is the work of black brains alone.

Externally, Tuskegee has none of the orderly design which one finds in the “campus” of a Northern University. It is evidently a place that has “growed.” Buildings are dotted here and there over the somewhat rugged site, with small eye to picturesqueness or dignity of general effect. Except the Carnegie Library, with its well-proportioned portico, there is no building of much architectural ambition; but the chapel or general assembly hall of the Institute struck me as showing real originality of design. I was extremely sorry not to hear one of Mr. Washington’s Sunday evening “talks” to the students in this fine hall. I had not time even to see an assembly of the whole school, in its neat blue uniform, nor to hear its singing of old negro melodies, which is said to be remarkable.

In speaking of Tuskegee architecture, one must not omit to mention that nearly all the buildings of the Institute are built by the students themselves, of bricks burnt in their own brickyard. All furniture and fittings, too, are made and repaired within the Institute. I went through one or two of the students’ dormitories; the little cubicles were simple, neat, clean, fairly comfortable, but entirely devoid of luxury or upholstery. As I have before explained, tuition is provided by endowment, while the students are supposed to pay for their board and lodging at the rate of about thirty-five shillings a month, which they are enabled to earn, wholly or in part, for themselves.

After a far too brief visit, I left Tuskegee with the liveliest admiration for its methods and results. |A Reflection and a Query.| It is beyond all question a radiating centre of materially helpful and morally elevating influences. Mr. Washington is assuredly doing a great and an indispensable work for his race; nor is he doing it in any such spirit of contempt for academic and literary culture as his critics attribute to him.

But two reflections occurred to me as I returned through the red twilight to Montgomery. The first was obvious enough—namely, that the men and women turned out by such an institution as Tuskegee cannot possibly be taken as representing the average of negro capacity. They are a select company before they go there—or, rather, in the very fact of their going there. They are impelled by individual and exceptional intelligence, thirst for knowledge, desire for betterment. Some, it is true, are sent by their parents, very much as white boys are sent to school or college; but whereas the white boy’s parents are merely following a social tradition, the black boy’s parents are taking a clear step in advance, and showing not only ambition but (in all probability) a good deal of self-denial. Almost every one, in short, who enrols himself at Tuskegee is animated from the outset by some measure of Mr. Washington’s own spirit; and not a few show, in the pursuit of knowledge, something of the heroism which marked his early career.

My second reflection took the form of a query. I did not doubt for a moment that Mr. Washington’s work was wise and salutary; but I wondered whether the material and moral uplifting of the negro was going to bring peace—or a sword. In other words, do the essential and fundamental difficulties of the situation really lie in the defects of the negro race? May not the development of its qualities merely create a new form of friction? And far beneath the qualities and defects of either race, may there not lie deep-rooted instincts which no “Atlanta Compromise” will bring into harmony?

Tuskegee marks an inevitable stage of the conflict; but is it the beginning of the end? I wonder.

After the daughter, the mother. Being again in America this year (1909), I stole a few days for a run into Virginia and a visit to Hampton, the fount and origin of the whole movement for the industrial training of the coloured race. It is perhaps well to take Tuskegee before Hampton, just as, in visiting English Universities, it would be well to take Liverpool or Birmingham before Oxford or Cambridge.

Hampton is on historic ground, and looks over still more historic waters. It stands at the tip of the peninsula formed (roughly speaking) by Chesapeake Bay to the east and north and the James River to the west and south. Yet not quite at the tip; for the spit of land which Captain John Smith in 1608 named Point Comfort runs some two miles further to the southward, and forms a sort of breakwater for Hampton Roads. The spit of land, now known as Old Point Comfort, is entirely given over to two great establishments—Fortress Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was imprisoned after the war, and the Hotel Chamberlin, one of those huge American caravanserais which are devoted to the cultivation partly of health, partly of sport, and wholly of fashion. The Chamberlin, despite its Pompeian swimming-bath and its circular dancing-pavilion built out over the waters of the sound, is not quite so extensive or so sumptuous as the Virginia Hot Springs Hotel, to say nothing of the Ponce de Leon and other palaces of Florida; but its life has a colour of its own, due to the large infusion of artillery officers from the Fort, which is but a stone’s throw away. The coming and going of the great white river-steamers, too, lends animation to the scene. Old Point is a meeting-place for these floating hotels, hailing from New York, Baltimore, Washington, and Richmond. Moreover, there is plenty of shipping in the Roads, consisting for the most part of the great four- and five-masted schooners which still abound in these waters. Some six miles up the estuary to the westward rise the immense coal elevators of Newport News, with its navy-yard; while to the southward, on the further shore, towards Norfolk, one can dimly descry a city of towers and domes, the buildings of the Jamestown Exhibition of 1907. Altogether, despite the flatness of the coasts, this confluence of great estuaries with the Atlantic has a nobility and beauty of its own. The sky-effects are marvellous.

Twenty minutes in the electric car carry you from the Chamberlin to Hampton Institute, from valetudinarianism and luxury, time-killing and life-killing,^[36] to industry, frugality, character-building and—in far more than a theologic sense—soul-saving. The Institute is divided from the little town of Hampton (with its church built in 1660, of English bricks) by a wide creek, known as the Hampton River, which was populous, when we passed it, with negro oyster-dredgers. On a spacious campus, bordering on this creek, stand the buildings of the Institute—looking out upon the very reach of the Roads where the fight between the Merrimac and the Monitor opened a new chapter in naval history. Both banks of the creek are well-wooded, and the white houses, with their wide verandahs deep-set in the tender green of early spring, gave the scene a semi-tropical air. It needed only a few palm-trees to transport one to Florida. The campus, too, is rich in flowering shrubs. A marvellous rose-tree in full bloom almost covered the office-building; hard by, a great bush of wisteria (standard, not climbing) made the air heavy with scent; and tulip-trees and climbing wisteria were to be seen at every turn. In the exquisite amenity of its site lies one great contrast between Hampton and Tuskegee. The red and gully-gashed Alabama upland, where Booker Washington has established his city, is unkempt, almost untimbered, and as nearly bleak as any place can be in that southern climate; whereas the Hampton student may sing with literal truth:—

But as I watched the negroes plunging their dredgers into the mud of Hampton Creek, I could not but wonder whether the downs of Tuskegee might not be the healthier habitation.

The fundamental contrast, however, between the two institutions lies in the fact that at Tuskegee the organizing and teaching staff is all black (or brown), at Hampton all white.^[37] The founder of Hampton, General S. C. Armstrong, was born in the Sandwich Islands in 1839, the son of a missionary. He was a man of extraordinary strength and vitality, a muscular Christian in the fullest sense of the term. In the war, he commanded a negro regiment,^[38] and after the war he put aside all opportunities of personal gain and advancement to devote himself to the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau. This brought him to Hampton; and here, in April, 1868, he opened his school, with one assistant teacher and fifteen pupils. Next year the attendance increased to sixty-six, and in 1870 the Institute received a charter (but no endowment) from the Virginia Legislature. In 1878 it was decided to admit Indians as well as negroes, and now about ten per cent. of the students belong to the aboriginal tribes. Armstrong had immense difficulties to contend with. The whole of the money for his enterprise had to be raised by his personal exertions; and the value of his idea—the value of negro education in general and industrial training in particular—was not then a tested fact, but remained to be proven in the face of much scepticism. A minor difficulty lay in the prejudice of the negroes themselves against manual training. This was still, in their eyes, the badge of servitude; and they were apt to rebel when, asking for Greek, they were given a hoe. With indomitable energy and geniality, however, Armstrong stuck to his task; and when, early in the nineties, he was stricken with paralysis, Hampton was already a great institution, and Tuskegee was firmly founded.

At Hampton there are now 113 buildings (65 of them of considerable size) and a home farm of 120 acres; while at Shellbank, six miles away, the school owns a farm of over 600 acres, with 150 head of cattle, 30 horses and mules, 100 hogs, and fowls by the thousand. The students enrolled in the Institute number 863, while the Whittier Preparatory School has nearly 500 pupils. In addition to all branches of agriculture and horticulture, fifteen trades are taught to boys, while girls are thoroughly trained in every form of domestic industry, laundry-work, dressmaking, etc. The teaching and organizing staff numbers about 200, or one to every six pupils. It is the deliberate policy of the Institute to seek for increase of efficiency rather than of numbers, and the entrance tests are correspondingly severe.

The Principal, Dr. H. B. Frissell, was unfortunately absent when I visited Hampton. |A Tour of the Institute.| I had met him a year before at Memphis, and learnt to appreciate his quietly commanding personality. Mrs. Frissell received us most courteously in the very beautiful old plantation-house which is now the Principal’s residence. A patriarchal hospitality is the tradition at Hampton, and we were cordially invited to remain, if not a week, at least a night. But a few hours were all we could spare; and the chaplain, Dr. Herbert Turner, very kindly constituted himself our guide.

He took us first to “the soul of the institution,” the Memorial Church, externally a fine building, internally, to my mind, memorably beautiful. It is a cruciform structure of romanesque style; but the arms of the cross are so short that they may be called apses rather than nave and transepts, and the great body of the space is covered by the dome. The four great arches are magnificent in their airy dignity, and the material, red and cream brick, is at once simple and beautiful. The doctrine here preached is entirely undenominational. The students are encouraged to adhere to their own denominations, “as they will thus be best able to serve the communities to which they return.” The official designation of the building is simple—“The Church of Christ in Hampton Institute”—and after several hours’ talk with Dr. Turner, I feel sure that his flock will imbibe from him no harsh or illiberal theology.

“We lay the greatest stress first and last,” he said, “on character-building. It is not the clever self-seeker that we look for and encourage—not the youth whose aim is personal success and money-making. It is the service he is to do to his people that we keep constantly before the student’s mind; and with the great majority that is actually and effectively the dominant idea. Many of them, of course, are training to be teachers; but all of them feel that they can teach indirectly in their different communities, by uprightness in life and efficiency in work. We follow carefully the careers of our students, and I am able to say that 83 per cent. of those who are now out in the world are Christian men and women, not merely in the sense of church-membership, but of the practical Christianity which is known by its fruits. We are especially careful to cultivate mutual kindliness and good feeling among teachers and pupils alike. It was a saying of General Armstrong’s that ‘cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy,’ and we still take that view.”

“Have you many students,” I asked, “who are supported by comparatively well-to-do parents?”

“Very few,” Dr. Turner replied; “and we do not particularly care for that class of young man or woman. All new students have to bring with them a registration-fee of ten dollars, and eleven dollars for one month’s board; but the great majority of them need little more than that, for they are immediately put to various sorts of unskilled work by which they are enabled to earn from fifteen to twenty dollars a month, and so can not only pay their current board bills, but lay up a sum to meet the expenses of the next year, when they go into the day-school or into trades in which, during their apprenticeship, they are unable to earn anything. You remember how Booker Washington, when he first presented himself, was so ignorant that he was almost rejected; but when he was told, by way of trial, to clean a room, the superintendent noticed that the dark corners were as thoroughly cleaned as the most visible parts, and accepted him on the strength of that observation.”

We were now in the boot- and harness-making division of the Trade School building. Pursuing the theme of thoroughness suggested by the anecdote of Booker Washington, Dr. Turner continued—