the future. The most hopeful feature of the
situation is the fact that those friends and champions of the negro who
have studied the question most carefully upon the spot, have grown more
confident all the time that ultimately things would work out right.
General Armstrong died full of faith in the future. Mr Washington grows
more hopeful every year. Outsiders may well feel that there is no
occasion for despair when the voice of cheer is heard from the very
heart of the Black Belt."

We learn from an article by Mr Pitt Dillingham, in _The Outlook_ of New
York (April 12, 1902), that Booker Washington is a trustee of the
Calhoun Coloured School in Lowndes County, a part of the Black Belt in
Alabama, where the negroes greatly outnumber the whites. The school may
possibly take its name from the family of John Caldwell Calhoun
(1782-1850), a well-remembered statesman of the Republic, who was
Vice-President 1825-1832; an uncompromising defender of slavery, and
propounder of the political doctrine of Nullification--the rejection of
any State of any Act which was judged to be unconstitutional. The
students in the Calhoun School receive just such an industrial education
as would be given at Hampton or Tuskegee; but to us the institution is
the more noteworthy because it has become identified with a kind of
land-movement, which may have the most far-reaching consequences, so far
as the coloured race is concerned. Practically, the school is an
illustration of the way in which those who have been trained at Hampton,
or under Booker Washington at Tuskegee, in turn become teachers and
leaders to their own people. Mr Dillingham remarks:--

"The two young women from New England--one from Boston, one from New
Haven--Hampton teachers who first rang a school-bell ten years ago on
the old Shelby plantation in Lowndes County, simply desired to get into
the Black Belt, to identify themselves with a community of
cotton-raisers as neighbours, to know the people at first hand, and then
to meet the human need about them in any way possible; above all,
helping the people to help themselves ... in the Black Belt of Alabama,
a county containing the largest proportion of blacks to whites. The
average ratio for the seventeen counties in Alabama's cotton-belt is
less than three to one. In Lowndes County in 1892 the ratio was seven to
one--28,000 to 4000. This meant maximum conditions of ignorance and
poverty--a county likely to be Africanised if it c