al Democracy," "you do more than merely teach him to cleanse
his body. You introduce him to a new kind of life and create in him a
desire for better living."

The month before he began his wonderful work at Tuskegee, Booker
Washington spent visiting the Negro families in the part of Alabama
where he was to teach. "One of the saddest things I saw during the month
of travel which I have described," he writes in his autobiography, "was
a young man, who had attended some high school, sitting down in a
one-room cabin, with grease on his clothing, filth all around him, and
weeds in the yard and garden, engaged in studying a French grammar."

Farther on he writes, "It has been interesting to note the effect that
the use of the tooth-brush has had in bringing about a higher degree of
civilization among the students. With few exceptions, I have noticed
that, if we can get a student to the point where, when the first or
second tooth-brush disappears, he of his own motion buys another, I have
not been disappointed in the future of that individual. Absolute
cleanliness of the body has been insisted upon from the first."

Cleanliness is an attribute of civilization. We find it amusing to read
that three or four hundred years ago bathing for pleasure was unknown,
that when soap was first invented it was used only for washing clothes,
and that even so late as the Seventeenth Century an author compiling a
book of rules for the gentleman of that day advises him to wash his
hands every day and his face almost as often! In the monasteries bathing
was permitted only to invalids and the very old. Perfume was used
copiously, and filth and squalor abounded. This even in royal circles.
Among the common people conditions were unspeakable.

To-day a gentleman bathes and shaves every day. He keeps his hair
brushed, his finger nails immaculate (or as clean as the kind of work
which he does permits), his linen is always clean and his shoes are
polished. He is not over-fastidious about his clothes, but he has
respect enough for himself as well as for the people among whom he lives
to want to present as agreeable an appearance as possible. "Dress,"
wrote Lord Chesterfield to his son, "is a very foolish thing, and yet it
is a very foolish thing for a man not to be well-dressed, according to
his rank and way of life.... The difference in this case between a man
of sense and a fop is that the fop values himself upon his dress; and
the man of sense la