erely questioned
because of the imagined disloyalty in a Negro's aggressive attitude for
this particular kind of education for his race. There are people of both
races who, while they do not on the whole oppose Hampton and Tuskegee in
their educational methods, are honestly afraid that, because of the
growing importance and influence of these two schools and others of a
similar kind, the idea will be thoroughly established that the Negro
needs only and is capable only of the narrowest sort of industrial
training--such as is represented by the "rule-of-thumb carpenter" and
the "one-suspender mule-driver," who work by rule and rote rather than
by principle and method, not in the slightest degree comprehending the
science underlying the work in which they are engaged, whose
mathematical knowledge is bounded by "the distance between two corn or
cotton rows."

To fix such an idea in the minds of the people of this country--which is
not likely to be done--would, no doubt, be disastrous to us for
generations to come, and make it much more easy than it is now to
deprive the Negro of the civil and political rights which are guaranteed
by the Constitution. It would, without question, defeat the objects for
which Hampton and Tuskegee have persistently stood, and for which they
have ever worked and are still very successfully working.

No one familiar with the curricula of these two schools would for a
moment raise such a question. General Armstrong saw, as few people did,
the moral and intellectual value of industrial training aside from its
merely economic importance. He founded a school on an entirely different
basis from any that had been known before--the basis of
character-building through practical education, industrial training, and
self-help.

During the thirty-six years of its history, Hampton has sent into the
world about 1,200 graduates and 5,000 undergraduates, many of whom have
taken with them the spark that has started many other Hamptons, large
and small, among the Negroes of the South and the Indians of the West.
Hampton's success, and indeed the success of any institution, depends
not so much upon the scholastic attainments of its pupils as upon the
work that those who have received its instruction accomplish. Hampton
glories, and justly, in the loyalty of its graduates and in the
faithfulness with which they have inculcated and exemplified the
traditions and principles for which it stands. Hampton glories in