e cultivation of
the higher arts."

I would set no limits to the attainments of the Negro in arts, in letters
or statesmanship, but I believe the surest way to reach those ends is by
laying the foundation in the little things of life that lie immediately
about one's door. I plead for industrial education and development for the
Negro not because I want to cramp him, but because I want to free him. I
want to see him enter the all-powerful business and commercial world.

It was such combined mental, moral and industrial education which the late
General Armstrong set out to give at the Hampton Institute when he
established that school thirty years ago. The Hampton Institute has
continued along the lines laid down by its great founder, and now each
year an increasing number of similar schools are being established in the
South, for the people of both races.

Early in the history of the Tuskegee Institute we began to combine
industrial training with mental and moral culture. Our first efforts were
in the direction of agriculture, and we began teaching this with no
appliances except one hoe and a blind mule. From this small beginning we
have grown until now the Institute owns two thousand acres of land, eight
hundred of which are cultivated each year by the young men of the school.
We began teaching wheelwrighting and blacksmithing in a small way to the
men, and laundry work, cooking and sewing and housekeeping to the young
women. The fourteen hundred and over young men and women who attended the
school during the last school year received instruction--in addition to
academic and religious training--in thirty-three trades and industries,
including carpentry, blacksmithing, printing, wheelwrighting
harnessmaking, painting, machinery, founding, shoemaking, brickmasonry and
brickmaking, plastering, sawmilling, tinsmithing, tailoring, mechanical
and architectural drawing, electrical and steam engineering, canning,
sewing, dressmaking, millinery, cooking, laundering, housekeeping,
mattress making, basketry, nursing, agriculture, dairying and stock
raising, horticulture.

Not only do the students receive instruction in these trades, but they do
actual work, by means of which more than half of them pay some part or all
of their expenses while remaining at the school. Of the sixty buildings
belonging to the school all but four were almost wholly erected by the
students as a part of their industrial education. Even the bricks which