That
negroes should show other characteristics should inspire the
encouragement coming from the hope that they are destined for better
things than have usually entered into the calculations of American
politicians. It is because Booker Washington so thoroughly well
understands his race that he can harbour such bright hopes of their
future, provided that common-sense means are used to train and educate
them, so as to give them an opportunity of making the best possible use
of their capacities. He is quite an ingenuous man, who says just what he
thinks, and who would never think of aiming at the impracticable. What
may at first have seemed to be quite a Utopian enterprise to quidnuncs
in American social and political circles is to him a very ordinary
business. He has solved what has been to others a dark problem, because
he has failed to see that there was any problem which needed solution.
He sees in the labour of the millions of negroes who people the Southern
States a source of vast national wealth. Only turn this to good account
and the whole country will be benefited and enriched, while the
descendants of the ex-slaves themselves will remain contented and good
citizens. To carry out this idea is certainly one of the greatest of
enterprises to which social reformers in the New World have ever set
their hand.

When a school was established and a supposed competent tutor was
appointed, Booker Washington did not find that his course had ceased to
be a pursuit of knowledge under difficulties. His mother and stepmother
were so poor that it was not thought that his services at the salt works
could be altogether dispensed with in order that he might attend school.
Then a kind of compromise was made, and without the work being entirely
suspended, he was allowed to pass some portion of each day at the
school. Having thus risen to this respectable standing, he found it
desirable to wear a cap which his mother made for him; for it would seem
that a Virginian planter no more thought of providing such head-dress
for boy slaves than he would of clothing his colts or calves. It was
then, moreover, that he gave himself the name which he has ever since
retained and honoured. He had been called Booker as a child-slave; for
some reason his mother had added Taliaferro, but the final Washington
was a becoming euphonism of his own.

With so much manual labour to be done, the difficulties in the way of
education were continually becoming