close its doors. These facts are forgotten by such advocates of
industrial training as oppose the higher schools. Strong as the argument
for industrial schools is--and its strength is undeniable--its cogency
simply increases the urgency of the plea for higher training-schools and
colleges to furnish broadly educated teachers.

But intelligence and skill alone will not solve the Southern problem of
poverty. With these must go that combination of homely habits and
virtues which we may loosely call thrift. Something of thrift may be
taught in school, more must be taught at home; but both these agencies
are helpless when organized economic society denies to workers the just
rewards of thrift and efficiency. And this has been true of black
laborers in the South from the time of slavery down through the scandal
of the Freedmen's Bank to the peonage and crop-lien system of to-day. If
the Southern Negro is shiftless, it is primarily because over large
areas a shiftless Negro can get on in the world about as well as an
industrious black man. This is not universally true in the South, but it
is true to so large an extent as to discourage striving in precisely
that class of Negroes who most need encouragement. What is the remedy?
Intelligence--not simply the ability to read and write or to sew--but
the intelligence of a society permeated by that larger vision of life
and broader tolerance which are fostered by the college and university.
Not that all men must be college-bred, but that some men, black and
white, must be, to leaven the ideals of the lump. Can any serious
student of the economic South doubt that this to-day is her crying need?

Ignorance and poverty are the vastest of the Negro problems. But to
these later years have added a third--the problem of Negro crime. That a
great problem of social morality must have become eventually the central
problem of emancipation is as clear as day to any student of history. In
its grosser form as a problem of serious crime it is already upon us. Of
course it is false and silly to represent that white women in the South
are in daily danger of black assaulters. On the contrary, white
womanhood in the South is absolutely safe in the hands of ninety-five
per cent. of the black men--ten times safer than black womanhood is in
the hands of white men. Nevertheless, there is a large and dangerous
class of Negro criminals, paupers, and outcasts. The existence and
growth of such a class far from