also to agriculture, so that worn-out lands may be reclaimed and good
lands be kept up to the highest point of production. Neither mines,
forests, quarries, water-ways, nor textile fabrics can be handled to best
advantage without scientific knowledge and skilled labor. The South is
everywhere demanding these aids to her industrial development. But just
in the proportion that she gets them, and because she has them, will be
the need of higher education. The only safety against the influence of a
rolling mill is a college, the only safety against the practical and
materializing tendency of an industrial school is the increased study of
whatever contributes to the higher and non-sordid life of the mind. The
South would make a poor exchange for her former condition in any amount
of industrial success without a corresponding development of the highest
intellectual life.

But, besides the industrial problem, there is the race problem. It is the
most serious in the conditions under which it is presented that ever in
all history confronted a free people. Whichever way you regard it, it is
the nearest insoluble. Under the Constitution it is wisely left to the
action of the individual States. The heavy responsibility is with them.
In the nature of things it is a matter of the deepest concern to the
whole Republic, for the prosperity of every part is vital to the
prosperity of the whole. In working it out you are entitled, from the
outside, to the most impartial attempt to understand its real nature, to
the utmost patience with the facts of human nature, to the most profound
and most helpful sympathy. It is monstrous to me that the situation
should be made on either side a political occasion for private ambition
or for party ends.

I would speak of this subject with the utmost frankness if I knew what to
say. It is not much of a confession to say that I do not. The more I
study it the less I know, and those among you who give it the most
anxious thought are the most perplexed, the subject has so many
conflicting aspects. In the first place there is the evolution of an
undeveloped race. Every race has a right to fair play in the world and to
make the most of its capacities, and to the help of the more favored in
the attempt. If the suggestion recently made of a wholesale migration to
Mexico were carried out, the South would be relieved in many ways, though
the labor problem would be a serious one for a long time, but the
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