umulated credits sufficient to pay their
way in the day-school, and those whose families are able to pay a
considerable part of their expenses. The earnings of a student in the
day-school can not be large enough to pay his current board bill, but
such a student is ordinarily enjoying the valuable advantage of working
at one of the more skilled trades.

The night-school student, perhaps, because of greater maturity in years
and experience, may be relied upon to apply himself with the utmost
diligence to his academic studies; so, in much less than half the
time-allotment, he advances in his academic studies about half as fast
as the day-school student. This schedule did not spring full-fledged
from the seething brain of any theorist; it is no fatuous imitation of
the educational practise of some remote and presumptively dissimilar
institution; it has, so to say, elaborated itself in adjustment to the
actual needs of the particular situation. This provision boasts not of
novelty, but of utility; though not ideal, it is practicable. But the
central fact is that this Tuskegee Plan, while clearly securing ample
time for the teaching of the industries, makes possible no mean amount
of academic study.

In order more clearly to exhibit the grounds of this proposition, I
shall refer in some slight detail to the course of study in English and
in Mathematics.

Mathematics represents the group of academic studies which possess
direct technical value for the industries; moreover, it is a pretty good
index of the grades comprehended in the Academic Department. In the
lowest class in the day-school--there is one lower in the
night-school--the arithmetical tables are mastered, and fractions
introduced and developed with the use of liquid, dry, surface, and time
measures; whereas in the Senior class algebra is studied through
quadratics and plane geometry through the "area of polygons." That is to
say, the lowest day-school class is about equivalent to a fourth grade
in the North, and the Senior to the first or the second year (barring
the foreign languages) in a Northern high school.

[Illustration: A PORTION OF THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.]

Despite a much smaller time-allotment, our students, roughly speaking,
keep pace with Northern students because they are older and somewhat
more serious, because the course is shortened by the elimination of
uselessly perplexing topics in arithmetic like compound proportion and
cube root, but chie