iful in the grass and flowers that surround him--is,
in short, able to see something beautiful, elevating, and inspiring in
everything that God has created. Not only should education enable us to
see beauty in these objects which God has put about us, but it is meant
to influence us to bring beautiful objects about us. I hope that each
one of you, after you graduate, will surround himself at home with what
is beautiful, inspiring, and elevating. I do not believe that any
person is educated so long as he lives in a dirty, miserable shanty. I
do not believe that any person is educated until he has learned to want
to live in a clean room made attractive with pictures and books, and
with such surroundings as are elevating. In a word, I wish to say again
that education is meant to give us that culture, that refinement, that
taste, which will make us deal truthfully and sympathetically with our
fellow men, and will make us see what is beautiful, elevating, and
inspiring in what God has created. I want you to bear in mind that your
text-books, with all their contents, are not an end, but a means to an
end--a means to help us get the highest, the best, the purest, and the
most beautiful things out of life."

The Tuskegee trained boy or girl has set before him every hour in the
day, and every day in the year, the substantial educational ideals here
set forth. Books, valuable as they are, and nowhere more thoroughly
reckoned as such than here, are only a means to an end: this is the
gospel preached by the Tuskegee teacher. Life is the great, the eternal
thing; the serving of one's fellows, the ministering unto the needy of a
groping, developing people--this is the thing not forgotten, but ever
constantly enforced by precept and by example.

The many old and time-worn frame buildings are being replaced by finely
built and imposing brick and stone structures; the tallow dip and
antiquated oil-lamp and gas-jet, as illuminators, have paled before the
more brilliant white light of electricity, installed by Tuskegee
students and operated by them. Patience and faith!--these are Tuskegee's
watchwords and her standard virtues. What can not be accomplished to-day
will certainly be accomplished to-morrow.

So, in its larger outlook and household anxieties, Tuskegee Institute
teachers are confident that the things taught and enforced by example
and precept will justify their efforts in helping to make a dependent
people independent, a dist