ls were
training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and
training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, by
reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the
more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and
crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the marvellous
pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread
and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the
freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger problem of Negro education
sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable economic
quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom,
and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice,
lawlessness and ruthless competition.

The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to
full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered
answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer
of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all
the schools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but
now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in
direct touch with the South's magnificent industrial development, and
given an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple of
Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the
temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader
question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in
America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material
advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is
the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and
to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever-recurring query of the
ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And
men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister signs in
recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery
and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to
regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be
trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which
keep brown and black men in their "places," we are coming to regard as
useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the
ambition a