l we
have and the spring of all our future joys. Our religion, our morality,
and that which is highest and best in our social and civic life, all
come from education. Therefore, it is the primary factor in the
elevation of all races.

Our education should be of a threefold nature, viz.: Literary,
Industrial and Religious. No limit should be placed upon the Negro's
literary qualification. A race so largely segregated as ours, needs its
own teachers, preachers, lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, and other
professional and business men, and therefore they should be given the
highest and best education that is obtainable. If our preachers and
teachers are inefficient, it is because they are improperly educated.
If the churches are growing cold and dying and the schools accomplishing
but very little good, it is because religion is not being made practical
and education not being made to apply to our every day life. Such an end
can only be accomplished through well and systematically trained
teachers and preachers. Better teachers and better preachers will go a
long way towards the alleviation of our ills. If we would secure the
kind of education here referred to, we must be willing to pay for it; we
must make a sacrifice, we must care less about forms and fashions and
more about the higher things of life. We must see less evils in the
dollar and more good.

We must not only have a good education, but we must have good industrial
training. This is a scientific as well as a literary age. A scientific
age is always an age of inventions and with new inventions comes the
demand for men qualified to manage large interests and complicated
machinery. This demand can only be supplied by industrially trained men
and women. This must be done in our industrial schools. Our hands should
be as truly trained to work as our minds to think, and any education
that teaches otherwise, is not worthy of the name.

I know that in some sections my people are prejudiced towards industrial
schools, but this is foolish in the extreme. If we are to hold our own
in this country, it must be by our ability to do work and to do it in
the most acceptable manner. We are in a farming section and I believe
that we should therefore strive to be the best farmers in the world. Let
us make a specialty of all the trades that are related in anyway to
agriculture; endeavor to become the best stock raisers, the best truck
gardeners, the best cooks, the best wash women,