might say the impossible tasks,
did we not remember Armstrong's attitude toward things "impossible."
Yet, even as to these,--are they not better off than when enslaved? A
part of their trouble is the burden of responsibility--for themselves,
their wives and children. In slavery they had no responsibility beyond
the day's task; the whip and the full stomach were the two extremes of
their possibilities. Now at least they are men--with manhood's burdens,
but with its possibilities, too.

Of the great middle class, something has already been said, as to
industry, property and education. But statistics are cold and dead,
could we but see the living human realities which they vainly try to
express. The growth of a slave, or a slave's child, into a free man or
woman,--the birth and development of true family life,--could we see
this in its millions of instances, or even distinctly in one typical
instance, with all its phases of struggle, mistake, disappointment,
success, the growth of character, the blossoming of manhood and
womanhood,--it would be a more moving spectacle than any that
Shakespeare has given. Here, again, it is mostly the inarticulate class,
and their story is not told to the world. We especially fail to learn
it, because of the wall of caste by which the white man shuts himself
out from the finest sights and the most brotherly opportunities. More
than farming or carpentry, more than school or church, and taking in the
best fruits of all these, is family life, in its fullest and best. That
is where the negro is coming to highest manhood.

A necessary test of a race is its power to furnish its own leaders. The
negro race in America is developing a leadership of its own,--small as
yet, but choice and growing. It was part of Armstrong's central idea to
create and supply such a leadership. Hampton has gone steadily on in the
work, and the sisters and the children of Hampton are multiplying their
fruits. It was by an ideal fitness of things that Armstrong attracted,
inspired and started as his worthy successor one of the negro race. At
Tuskegee the black man is doing for himself what at Hampton the white
man is doing for him. Booker Washington is the pupil and successor of
Armstrong, but he has his own distinct individuality, his own word and
work. His constant precept and practice has been that the black man
should make himself so serviceable and valuable to the community that
every door will open as fast as he i