congratulations. To name a few of the organizations with which his name is connected will give an idea of the scope of the work in which he is engaged. He is president of the Southern Education Board and of the Conference for Education in the South. He is the president of the Board of Trustees of the Union Theological Seminary. He is president of the Board of Trustees of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. He is a member and was formerly president of the General Education Board. He is a trustee of the Tuskegee School, of the Jeanes Fund Board, of the Board of Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church, and of the Russell Sage Foundation. He presided at the opening of the beautiful new building of Union Theology Seminary in New York City the past winter. His presidential address at the recent Jacksonville meeting of the Conference for Education in the South was a most masterly presentation of the great educational work in the South. May he long be spared to continue a career which has meant so much to the people of every part of this great country. Farthest Down A most interesting series of articles entitled, "The "The Man Man Farthest Down" has been appearing in the Outlook from the pen of Dr. Booker T. Washington, giving the results of his investigations, during a recent short visit to Europe, into the condition of the poor people of various countries. He is a keen observer. His early experiences in the coal mines of West Virginia have given him an insight into real conditions such as is possessed by few. His long study of the Negroes of the South has given him a background. He continually contrasts the people he meets with the poor of his own race. His conclusions are interesting. We speak of the Negro problem of the South as an unsettled one, yet the investigations of Dr. Washington lead one to believe that almost every country in Europe has a population much more hopeless and more difficult to uplift than all the Negroes of the United States. On several occasions after visiting Europe the writer has had occasion to say to the students at Hampton that there is scarcely a peasant class in any European country possessed of the opportunities which are offered to the Negroes of the South. The possibility of buying land, which is theirs in most parts of the South, gives them an independence and an impetus such as belongs to no peasant class in Europe. In a series of meetings held in private houses in the North, Major Moton of Hampton has emphasized the advantage of being one of a race which is just beginning its career; he has spoken of the stimulus there is in belonging to a people who for the first time are gaining possession of little plots of land and decent houses, who for the first time are receiving a common-school education. Among the things for which Major Moton expresses his gratitude to Hampton is the belief in the possibilities of his own race which it instilled into him. General Armstrong was accustomed to call attention to the fact that the word "degradation" contains the idea of having fallen from a higher plane. The Negro differs from the people of other races in that he is not degraded. He comes from a continent where he has never had opportunities. Slavery, while in many respects a remarkable training school, did not afford him the opportunities which the last half-century has brought. Men like Major Moton and Dr. Washington, who have had a chance to observe the progress of their race and also to help make that progress possible, hold an enviable position. The writer was walking one day through the streets of New York City with the late W. H. Baldwin and another friend. It was at a time when excavations were being made in the city and the streets were badly torn up. "How fine it will be," said the friend, "to live in New York when this work is done." "How much finer" said Baldwin, who had had much to do with the improvements, "to have had a hand in making it better." By writing these articles Dr. Washington is doing valuable service in helping his people to respect their own progress and to recognize their own possibilities. Getting Hold of One of the difficulties presented by Indian education is the problem of the small boy. He does not take naturally to going to school and is restive under the forcing process of primary education. True to his inheritance he turns far more instinctively than does the white boy to the lessons of nature and the crafts of the woods and fields. These are the things he likes and wants to know about, and it is through these that he may most easily be led to other things. The natural bent of his nature must certainly afford the readiest handle by which to take hold in gaining his interest, and confidence in our teaching. For it is a recognized law of psychology that the education which works against the current of the child's natural inclinations is wasted, while that which works with it accomplishes the best results. Even more than to the white boy then, the "boy scout" movement, which is attaining such world-wide popularity as of training the boys in manly conduct while interesting them in whole a means some play, will apply to the Indian youth. If this movement, the purpose of which is to develop moral fibre and strength of character while at the same time it makes for robustness of limb, results in saving our white boys from degenerating idleness or malicious amusement, there seems no good reason to doubt that it would work for the benefit of the Indian boy also. First of all it would establish a bond of sympathy between him and his teachers. Many of the arts of scouting, such as the reading of the animal signs upon the trail and the use of the simple implements of the camp, are natural to the Indian, and in these the pupil would probably be more apt than his teacher. On the other hand the games of the signals and the team play are white man's arts which this boy would cultivate enthusiastically. And meantime the scout's law and his moral code would find in him fertile ground for taking root, and would exercise upon him their best influence, while the spirit of helpfulness towards others, the practice of which is the first duty of the scout, would operate to increase his kindliness and broaden his sympathies. It appears, therefore, that the scout movement has in it something specially suitable for the Indian lad, to which he would take with an enthusiasm which he does not display over much of the training that has thus far been attempted, and which may be counted upon to offset any degenerating influences such as have sometimes accompanied his schooling. It has been said that reformers have often failed with boys because they have generally left the real boy out of their calculations. The advantage of the boy-scout movement is that it emphasizes the boy and acknowledges all that is most boyish in him while at the same time it develops the man. In this training, then, there lie great possibilities for awakening the sympathies and arousing the spirit of this child of nature and for accomplishing the best results in education with the least expenditure of force and effort. Virginia Child Welfare In the Child Welfare Conference recently held in Richmond, Virginia enthusiastically joined the rapidly growing number of states which believe that the child should receive at least as serious social consideration as that given to vegetables, horses, cows, and commercial enterprises. The national appeal for the child, begun in the Child Welfare Exhibit in New York and continued in Chicago, is now being answered by many states. Virginia's response was strong, earnest, and genuine. The Richmond meeting declared its interest in all children, white and colored, and in all phases of child life, whether in the home, in the school, in the shop, on the farm, in the church, or on the playground. The Conference declared for the physical life, the mental progress, and the character development of every child in Virginia. To those engaged in work for the colored people it was particularly pleasing to note the spontaneous, hearty applause given by white people at every reference to the welfare of the colored child. This was strikingly illustrated in the applause given several speakers who strongly condemned the custom of neglecting sanitary conditions in the streets and homes of the colored people of larger cities. In the sessions devoted especially to the welfare of the colored child, unqualified praise was given to Mrs. Shippen's work in the Hanover Reformatory for colored boys, and to Mr. T. C. Walker's successful campaign for the placing of colored orphans in the homes of respectable colored people. Mrs. Barrett's plea that the development of the colored child be regarded as the care not of one race but of the whole community was heartily approved. The Servant "Solving the Problem," which appears on another page of this issue of the SOUTHERN WORKMAN, is especially significant coming as it does from the pen of a Southern woman. "Ladies from Norfolk," and even Southern ladies in general, are not alone in failing to understand how a colored school can really be useful so long as it does not help the servant problem-always meaning of course their servant problem. Northern friends of Hampton as well often express surprise--and feel more than they express, no doubt that they cannot get a good gardener or a good cook from Hampton for the asking. Is not Hampton an agricultural school, does it not teach cooking to its girls, and are not the would-be employers ready to pay good wages? A school superintendent in a well-known Southern city was spending a few hours at Hampton recently, and, in speaking of his experience with his colored schools, said that his school board a year or two ago wanted to give up all teaching of the household arts in the Negro schools because they could not see that it was any easier to get good cooks than before such instruction was given. With commendable wisdom and courage he replied that the primary purpose of giving instruction in cooking and sewing in colored schools was not to make cooks and seamstresses for white families. He told his Board that if they wished to see the results of such education they should visit the homes from which the children came, that there they would find a revolution in progress, and that it would be only after the general average of the Negro home was much improved and the standard of Negro life much higher that the average Negro cook would be better. The same idea is expressed in a recent volume, "Negro Life in the South," by W. D. Weatherford, also a Southern man. The writer says: "Some people have found fault with Tuskegee because it has not trained servants for our homes. It has done a much more important thing. It has sent out hundreds of graduates who have become the foremost leaders of their race-training them to be industrious, to work regularly, and to work efficiently. It is a better thing for a girl who graduates from Tuskegee to spend her energies teaching other women how to cook and sew well than to spend her time in one white man's kitchen. Ultimately we reap the benefit in the form of a better laboring class." The education of a race is a tremendously difficult thing. It involves many factors and is of necessity painfully slow. Patience and insight are essential even to justly appreciate what it all means. In Negro education that policy is best which can be commended on the broadest human grounds; only in such a policy will the white race find the largest permanent advantage to itself. Tuskegee's Influence in One way to test the work of a school is to inspect the county in which the institution is located. A splendid Macon County opportunity to make this test of Tuskegee Institute was recently given to a party of white and colored men who accompanied Dr. Washington and Lord Eustace Percy, of the British Embassy in Washington, on a fifty-five mile drive through Macon County. Ten community centers were visited. These centers are schools, churches, plantations, and groves, where the colored people are accustomed to hold their public meetings. The trip was interesting not only because it made possible a study of the influence of education on the people, but also because it revealed Tuskegee's unique methods of appeal to the masses of Negroes in the Black Belt of Alabama. Every kind of appeal that could be adapted to the occasion was brought into use by the Tuskegee workers. There were college yells adapted to rural life, expressing enthusiasm for raising vegetables, for establishing home schools, for everyday religion, and always for Booker Washington as the source of all the enthusiasm. There was the long line of twenty carriages, drawn by mules -an impressive procession to the country folk. There were arches and costumes and flags symbolizing the ideas which are to be realized by the people on their farms-a green flag for growing crops throughout |