with these impoverished and groping souls, what had
Armstrong, in his experience, knowledge, personality, with which to
meet them? "He was filled through and through"--the quotation is from
the admirable biographical sketch by his daughter--"with a deep sense
that by hard work alone can any of us be saved--a sense based on many
obscure foundations of observation and deduction. Away back in the
corners of his mind were recollections of sundry wood-choppings and
milkings carried on under protest by himself and his companions; and
knowledge, too, of how his father and mother had spent their ambitious
youth in work, the mother spinning by the fireside, the father doing
chores at his home in Pennsylvania. It was the boys who faced and
conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He
had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen,
too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural
conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament,
common to Hawaiian and negro,--how accessible to transient fervor, how
deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's
operations, as minister of public instruction under the Hawaiian king;
his experiments in more practical and prosaic education and religion,
half frowned on by the ecclesiastics of America, but rich in suggestion.
He knew that the Hilo manual labor school, where the boys paid their
expenses by labor, slightly trained, was a marked success. His intensely
active nature had caught from Hopkins the philosophic outlook, and the
human materials were before him in rich abundance. Above all, while
unspeculative in religion, and content to employ its traditional
forms,--"they're imperfect enough," he said, "but they're the best we've
got"--the instincts of his great and disciplined nature sent him
straight to the central realities of character, which are the true
foundations of society.

His ideal crystallized by that swift and sudden process in which the
long subconscious growth of the mind sometimes comes to fruitage. He
said in later years that before he entered the Bureau's service, while
sailing on a troop-ship to Texas, he saw as in a dream his school much
as it afterward became. Twice afterward the vision came to him.
Stationed at Hampton in 1866, while he was bringing order out of the
chaos around him, his mind was reaching forward surely and swiftly to
his larger project.

This wa