ional suffering which they might well have been spared. If we look
through such a record as the autobiography of Laura Haviland, we find
mention made of a number of atrocities belonging to this unsettled
period of the kind which, under the circumstances, were pretty sure to
happen. In a sense, Southern society was in a condition of that kind of
chaos which has often marked similar transition periods. Never before
were leaders more urgently needed who would work for peace and
advancement by showing those, whose interests were supposed to be at
variance, that their cause was one. Who could have prophesied at that
time that the coloured people were destined to find some of their best
friends among the whites of the south?

It has also to be confessed, that the outlook among the emancipated
people themselves was such as might be expected to inspire misgiving, or
even some alarm. They neither comprehended the situation nor could they
properly understand what was the true aim of education. Booker
Washington himself had been so thoroughly well trained in the best
school that then existed, that of General Armstrong at the Hampton
Institute, that he saw at a glance the kind of obstacles which
threatened to bring disaster to his race by hindering their progress. In
large measure the squalor and superstition which naturally come of
generations of the darkest ignorance prevailed. It was seen that the
training which was imperatively needed would have to be mainly
industrial, while there must be no aspiration for equality with the
whites by attempting to come into competition with them in the common
avocations of everyday life. This was actually happening, however, so
that while he studied for a time at Washington, the future founder of
the great institute at Tuskegee saw that there were breakers ahead
unless certain errors could be corrected. The negroes became too much
disposed to look to the Government to make full provision for them,
especially when they attained to the distinction of being able to read
and write. Many would indulge in extravagant habits in order to make it
appear that they were better off than they really were. Then there were
an extraordinary number who aspired to the rare distinction of shining
as divines and as admired preachers of the Gospel. Young men sought to
become instructors of others before they had any ballast of character of
their own. It was a time of danger and of the threatened loss of great
oppo