iries in a skillful, modern manner. We opened a dairy
department in connection with the school, where a number of young men
could have instruction in the latest and most scientific methods of dairy
work. At present we have calls--mainly from Southern white men--for twice
as many dairymen as we are able to supply. What is equally satisfactory,
the reports which come to us indicate that our young men are giving the
highest satisfaction and are fast changing and improving the dairy product
in the communities into which they go. I use the dairy here as an example.
What I have said of this is equally true of many of the other industries
which we teach. Aside from the economic value of this work I cannot but
believe, and my observation confirms me in my belief, that as we continue
to place Negro men and women of intelligence, religion, modesty,
conscience and skill in every community in the South, who will prove by
actual results their value to the community, I cannot but believe, I say,
that this will constitute a solution to many of the present political and
social difficulties.

Many seem to think that industrial education is meant to make the Negro
work as he worked in the days of slavery. This is far from my conception
of industrial education. If this training is worth anything to the Negro,
it consists in teaching him how not to work, but how to make the forces of
nature--air, steam, water, horse-power and electricity--work for him. If
it has any value it is in lifting labor up out of toil and drudgery into
the plane of the dignified and the beautiful. The Negro in the South works
and works hard; but too often his ignorance and lack of skill causes him
to do his work in the most costly and shiftless manner, and this keeps him
near the bottom of the ladder in the economic world.

I have not emphasized particularly in these pages the great need of
training the Negro in agriculture, but I believe that this branch of
industrial education does need very great emphasis. In this connection I
want to quote some words which Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy, of Montgomery,
Alabama, has recently written upon this subject:

"We must incorporate into our public school system a larger recognition of
the practical and industrial elements in educational training. Ours is an
agricultural population. The school must be brought more closely to the
soil. The teaching of history, for example, is all very well, but nobody
can really know anything o