ch of it is hurtful to
the cause it is designed to promote. The danger, at present, that most
seriously threatens the success of industrial training, is the
ill-advised insistence in certain quarters that this form of education
should be offered to the exclusion of all other branches of knowledge.
If the idea becomes fixed in the minds of the people that industrial
education means class education, that it should be offered the Negro
because he is a Negro, and that the Negro should be confined to this
sort of education, then I fear serious injury will be done the cause of
hand-training. It should be understood rather that at such institutions
as Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute, industrial education is not
emphasized because colored people are to receive it, but because the
ripest educational thought of the world approves it; because the
undeveloped material resources of the South make it peculiarly important
for both races; and because it should be given in a large measure to any
race, regardless of color, which is in the same stage of development as
the Negro.

On the other hand, no one understanding the real needs of the race would
advocate that industrial education should be given to every Negro to the
exclusion of the professions and other branches of learning. It is
evident that a race so largely segregated as the Negro is, must have an
increasing number of its own professional men and women. There is, then,
a place and an increasing need for the Negro college as well as for the
industrial institute, and the two classes of schools should, and as a
matter of fact do, cooperate in the common purpose of elevating the
masses. There is nothing in hand-training to suggest that it is a
class-training. The best educational authorities in the world are
indorsing it as an essential feature in the education of both races,
and especially so when a very large proportion of the people in question
are compelled by dint of circumstances to earn their living in
manufactures and agricultural and mechanical pursuits in general. It so
happens that the bulk of our people are permanently to remain in the
South, and conditions beyond their control have attached them to the
soil; for a long time the status of the majority of them is likely to be
that of laborers. To make hard conditions easier, to raise common labor
from drudgery to dignity, and to adopt systems of training that will
meet the needs of the greatest number and prepa