ly bring discredit upon
the whole higher training where none is actually intended_. It causes
the old friends of higher learning to pause, and take it far too
literally, and then determine that it is after all better to abandon the
support of institutions for higher education. The pity of it all is that
it is next to impossible to undo the wrong. Like the sped arrow and the
lost opportunity such words and their effect cannot be recalled. Even
assurance that it is largely jest comes too late. The jest has been all
too convincing and the converts have at once arrayed their philanthropy
against forwarding the efforts of those who seek the higher courses.
Dr. VanDyke has said that true manhood and womanhood cannot exist
without an ideal side; that these are the finer feelings which have no
market value but which must be kept alive. Why should we endeavor to
keep them alive? Simply because the world at large recognizes that this
means development in the highest sense, and we claim that this is an
especial need of the Negro race. Then we ask, How are these finer
feelings kept alive? and the answer comes that this stimulation must
proceed from culture and scholarship.
With our needs pressing upon us we see as no other people the importance
of all this to bring about a change in the environment of the race. It
has a bearing upon this desired change that the virtues resulting from
manual labor alone cannot exert. Industrial training is needed too to
teach how to earn a living, but, as intimated in this paper, something
else--the higher education--must be counted upon to teach _how to live
better lives, how to get the most and best out of life_.
There is much involved in the attempt of the educated Negro to fulfil
his mission. The fact that there is such a swing of the pendulum away
from higher training for the race, makes it more difficult for those who
possess it to-day to carry out the mission. The Negro scholar who sets
out to pursue the paths pointed out does it at a great amount of
self-sacrifice. He must expect to meet rebuff, discouragement,
misinterpretation, lack of recognition, hardships, and these do not by
any means come alone from the Anglo-Saxon. The foes are often of his own
race. It will take all the philosophy he can summon to contend with the
opposition that comes from ignorance, from coarseness, from the
unthinking and the malicious. It will need all his self-control and
forbearance to move along under gr
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