were baptized on one Sabbath. A late number of The Missionary said of him: "He not only builds churches and preaches the gospel and beautifies the land with broad avenues and boulevards, but, like Luke, he is also the beloved physician. He is known, loved and reverenced by the natives far and wide." Still another Hampton student, who went as a missionary to Liberia, not only preaches but has a large coffee farm and has been practicing the blacksmith's trade which he learned at Hampton. One of his last letters tells of having just completed the only iron bridge ever built in Liberia.

I have given you a very imperfect account of the results of Hampton's work. Not only has it sent out between 7,000 and 8,000 negro and Indian students into every part of the South and West, but it has influenced the education of the whole country. The Government Indian industrial schools have been directly modeled after Hampton, and largely through its influence industrial training is being introduced into all the schools of the South. The chairman of the board of education of one of our large northern cities said in a public address that Hampton had done more to bring about the introduction of manual training into the schools of his city than any other influence. The West Indies, too, are being influenced by Hampton, not only through the students who are being sent back there, but by the delegations that are sent from the islands to study its methods. Former Hampton teachers have gone to General Armstrong's island home, and the most important school in Honolulu is in their care. More important than the direct is the indirect influence of Hampton. In an admirable article in a recent number of the Atlantic Monthly, Doctor Washington shows how industrial education, as started by General Armstrong at Hampton, has had the result of bringing together not only the whites and blacks of the South, but the whites of the North and South in an endeavor to work out this great problem. The southern and general education boards would hardly have been possible without it.

At the opening of the present school year there were over 1,200 negro and Indian boys and girls receiving instruction on the Hampton grounds-800 boarders and 400 day scholars. Five hundred student-teachers were gathered from every part of the South in attendance upon its summer school of six weeks. Our annual expenses are $180,000, about $100,000 of which is provided for by interest on the endowment fund, on one-third of the land-scrip fund of the State of Virginia, the Slater fund, the Morrill Act fund, and an annual appropriation by Congress toward the support of 120 Indians. An appeal has to be made each year for $80,000 to meet the school's current expenses. One-eighth of this amount has been provided for the last two years by the generous chairman of this meeting, Mr. Carnegie. The remaining $70,000, together with provision for the school's permanent improvements, is given sums varying from $1 to $5,000. Several friends have given $1,000 a year for the last two years. Much of the time of the school's officers, which ought to be given to the institution itself, has now to be spent in raising the necessary funds. Since General Armstrong's death in 1893 the school's endowment has been increased from $360,000 to $1,200,000. It needs an endowment of $2,000,000. While it would still be obliged to appeal to the public, the strain of securing so large an amount each year would be removed. The increased cost of coal and provisions, together with the larger number of students, makes the present year an especially hard one. Seventy dollars pays the scholarship of a student for a single year. In a book called "Twenty-two Years' Work at Hampton" there are given hundreds of such stories as I have told you of Hampton's graduates. Mentioned in connection with these are the names of some of the best men and women of this country, who have made those lives possible. In General Armstrong's "Memo

See to it, you

randa " is found this appeal: "Hampton must not go down. who are true to the black and red children of the land, and to just ideas of education."

Mr. CARNEGIE. Now we come to the last speaker. What shall I say, or how introduce him to you? Fellow-slave of Epictetus and destined to be as renowned in history. Starting where he did I know of no man living who has traveled so far onward and upward. Read his memorable book, Up from Slavery, and behold him to-day the recognized Moses of his race, who is leading it up to a standard worthy of citizenship and the suffrage. Hereafter history is to tell of two Washingtons--one white, the other black; both fathers of their people. It is with extreme pleasure I now present to you Booker Washington.

ADDRESS OF DOCTOR WASHINGTON.

The anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln and the presentation of the claims of the Hampton Institute furnish a fitting occasion to discuss the condition of my race.

Several persons holding high official position have recently said that it does not pay, from any point of view, to educate the negro, and that all attempts at his education have so far failed to accomplish any good results. Except that these utterances come from official sources, they would have little claim to a place in a meeting of this character. But the Southern States, which out of their poverty are contributing rather liberally for the education of all the people, as well as individual and organized philanthropy throughout the country, have a right to know whether the negro is responding to the efforts they have made to place him upon a higher plane of civilization.

It is not possible to improve the condition of any race until its mind is awakened and strengthened. Does the American negro desire to improve his mind, and what has been the result of his efforts? Will it pay to invest further money in this direction? In partially answering this question it is hardly fair to compare the progress of the American negro with that of the American white man, who in some unexplained way got thousands of years ahead of the negro in the arts and sciences of civilization. But, to get at the real facts and the real capability of the black man, let us compare for a moment the American negro with the negro in Africa, or the black man with the black man, As was recently suggested by Mr. Carnegie, in South Africa alone there are 5,000,000 black people who have never been brought, through school or other agencies, into contact with a higher civilization, in a way to have their minds or their ambitions strengthened or awakened. As a result, the industries of South Africa languish and refuse to prosper for lack of labor. The native black man refuses to labor, because he has been neglected. He has few wants and little ambition, and his crude and few wants may be satisfied by laboring one or two days out of the seven. In the southern part of the United States there are more than 8,000,000 of my race who, both by contact with the whites and by education in the home, in school, in church, have had their minds awakened and strengthened-have thus had their wants increased and multiplied many times. Hence, instead of a people in idleness, we have in the South a people who are anxious to work because they want education for their children; they want land and houses, and churches, books, and papers. In a word, they want the highest and best in our civilization. Looked at, then, from the most material and selfish point of view, it has paid to awaken the negro's mind, and there should be no limit placed upon the development of that mind.

Does the American negro take advantage of opportunities to secure educa

tion? Practically no schoolhouse has been opened for the negro since the war that has not been filled. Often hungry and in rags, making sacrifices of which you little dream, the negro youth has been determined to annihilate his mental darkness. With all his disadvantages the negro, according to official records, has blotted out 55.5 per cent of his illiteracy since he became a free man, while practically 95 per cent of the native Africans are illiterate. After years of civilization and opportunity in Spain, 68 per cent of the population are illiterate; in Italy, 38 per cent. In the average South American country about 80 per cent are illiterate, while after forty years the American negro has only 44.5 per cent of illiteracy to his debit. I have thus compared the progress of my race not with the highest civilized nations, for the reason that, in passing judgment upon us, the world too often forgets that, either consciously or otherwise, because of geographical or physical proximity to the American white man, we are being compared with the very highest civilization that exists.

Having seen that the American negro takes advantage of every opportunity to secure an education, I think it will surprise some to learn to what an extent the race contributes toward its own education and works in sympathetic touch with the whites at the South. In emphasizing this fact I use the testimony of the best southern white men. Says the State superintendent of education of Florida in one of his recent official reports: "The following figures are given to show that the education of the negroes of middle Florida (the black belt of Florida) does not cost the white people of that section one cent." In those eight black belt counties the total cost of the negro schools is $19,457. The total contributed by the negro in direct and indirect taxes amounted to $23,984, thus leaving a difference of $4,527 which, according to the superintendent, went into white schools. In Mississippi for the year ending in 1899, according to an eminent authority, the negroes had expended on their schools about 20 per cent of the total school fund, or a total of about $250,000. During the same year they paid toward their own education in poll taxes, State, county, and city taxes, and indirect taxes, about $280,000, or a surplus of about $30,000. So that, looked at from any point of view, it would seem that the negroes in that State are in a large measure paying for their own education.

But all this has little to do with my main purpose, and that is to emphasize the fact that with all the negro is doing for himself, with all the white people in the South are doing for themselves, and despite all that one race is doing to help the other, the present opportunities for education are woefully inadequate for both races. In the year 1877–78 the total expenditure for education in the ex-slave States was a beggarly $2.61 per capita for whites and only $1.09 for blacks; on the same basis the United States Commissioner of Education reasons that for the year 1900-1901, $35,400,000 were spent for the education of both races in the South, of which $6,000,000 went to negroes, or $4.92 per capita for whites and $2.21 for blacks; on the same basis, each child in Massachusetts has spent upon his education $22.35 and each one in New York $20.53 yearly.

From both a moral and religious point of view, what measure of education the negro has received has paid, and there has been no step backward in any State. Not a single graduate of the Hampton Institute or of the Tuskegee Institute can be found to-day in any jail or State penitentiary. After making careful inquiry, I can not find a half dozen cases of a man or woman who has completed a full course of education in any of our reputable institutions, like Hampton, Tuskegee, Fisk, or Atlanta, who are in prisons. The records of the South show that 90 per cent of the colored people in prisons are without knowledge of trades and 61 per cent are illiterate. This statement alone disproves the assertion that the negro grows in crime as education increases. If the

negro at the North is more criminal than his brother at the South, it is because the North withholds from him the opportunity for employment which the South gives. It is not the educated negro who has been guilty of or even charged with crime in the South; it is, as a rule, the one who has a mere smattering of education or is in total ignorance. While the negro may succeed in getting into the State prison faster, the white man in some inexplainable manner has a way of getting out faster than the negro. To illustrate: The official records of Virginia for a year show that one out of every three and one-half white men were freed from prison by executive clemency, and that only one out of every fourteen negroes received such clemency. In Louisiana it is one to every four and onehalf.white men and one to every forty-nine negroes. So that when this feature is considered matters are pretty well evened up between the races.

As bearing further upon the tendency of education to improve the morals of the negro, and therefore to prolong his life, no one will accuse the average New York' insurance company of being guided by mere sentiment toward the negro in placing its risks; with the insurance company it is a question of cold busiA few months ago the chief medical examiner for the largest industrial insurance company in America stated that after twenty years' experience and observation his company had found that the negro who was intelligent, who worked regularly at a trade or some industry and owned his home was as safe an insurance risk as a white man in the same station in life.

ness.

Not long ago a Southern white man residing in the town of Tuskegee, who represents one of the largest and most wealthy accident and casualty companies. in New York, wrote to his company to the effect that while he knew his company refused to insure the ordinary, ignorant colored man, at the Tuskegee Institute there were some 150 officers and instructors who were persons of education and skill, with property and character, and that he, a Southern white man, advised that they be insured on the same terms as other races; and within a week the answer came back: "Insure without hesitation every negro on the Tuskegee Institute grounds of the type you name." The fact is that almost every insurance company is now seeking the business of the educated negro. If education increased the risk, they would seek the ignorant negro rather than the educated one. As bearing further upon the effect of education upon the morals of the negro during the last forty years, let us go into the heart of the black belt of Mississippi and inquire of Alfred Holt Stone, a large and intelligent cotton planter, as to the progress of the race. Mr. Stone says:

The last census shows that the negro constitutes 87.6 per cent of the population of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Yet we hear of no black incubus; we have bad few midnight assassinations, and fewer lynchings. The violation by a negro of the person of a white woman is with us an unknown crime; nowhere else is the line marking the social separation of the two races more rigidly drawn; nowhere are the relations between the two more kindly. With us race riots are unknown, and we have but one negro problem, though that constantly confronts us, how to secure more negroes.

There are few higher authorities on the progress of the negro than Joel Chandler Harris, of the Atlanta Constitution, of "Uncle Remus" fame. Mr. Harris had opportunity to know the negro before the war, and he has followed his progress closely in freedom. In a printed statement two weeks ago Mr. Harris says:

In spite of all, however, the condition of the negro has been growing better. We can not fairly judge a race, or a country, or a religious institution, or a social organization, or society itself, nay, not the Republic in which we take pride, unless we measure it by the standard set up by the men who are its best representatives. .

We are in such a furious hurry. We are placed in a position of expecting a race but a few years from inevitable ignorance, imposed on it by the conditions of slavery, to make the most remarkable progress that the world has ever heard of, and when we discover that in the nature of things this is impossible, we shake our heads sadly and are ready to lose heart and hope.

The point I desire to make is that the overwhelming majority of the negroes in all parts of the South, especially in the agricultural regions, are leading sober and industrious lives. A temperate race is bound to be industrious, and the negroes are temperate when compared with the whites. Even in the towns the majority of them are sober and industrious. The idle and criminal classes among them make a great show in the police court records, but right here in Atlanta the respectable and decent negroes far outnumber those who are on the lists of the police as old or new offenders. I am bound to conclude from what I see about me, and from what I know of the race elsewhere, that the negro, notwithstanding the late start he has made in civilization and enlightenment, is capable of making himself a useful member in the communities in which he lives and moves, and that he is becoming more and more desirous of conforming to all the laws that have been enacted for the 'protection of society. ⚫

In connection with this testimony from Joel Chandler Harris, may I add, no one has a right to pass final judgment upon the moral status of a race unless he has visited the homes, the intellectual gatherings, the schools and churches, where he can observe something of the higher life of that people. Our moral progress must not be judged by the man on the street. You may not know it, but the moral lines are beginning to be as strictly drawn in my race as in yours, and it must not be forgotten that we are as proud of our race as you are of yours, and that the more progress we make in education the more satisfaction do we find in our homes and social circles.

We are to live in the South, and sympathy between the races is vital, and we must convince the southern white people of the value of educating the negro, and this we are doing, according to the testimony of southern people themselves. Some time ago I sent out letters to representative southern men, covering each ex-slave State, asking them, judging by their observation in their own communities, what effect education had upon the negro. To these questions I received 136 replies, as follows:

1. Has education made the negro a more useful citizen? Answer. Yes, 121; no, 4; unanswered, 11.

2. Has it made him more economical and more inclined to acquire wealth? Answer. Yes, 98; no, 14; unanswered, 24.

3. Does it make him a more valuable workman, especially where skill and thought are required?

Answer. Yes, 132; no, 2; unanswered, 2.

4. Do well-trained, skilled negro workmen find any difficulty in securing work in your community?

Answer. No, 117; yes, 4; unanswered, 15.

5. Are colored men in business patronized by the whites in your community? Answer. Yes, 92; no, 9; unanswered, 35. (The large number of cases in which this question was not answered is due to scarcity of business men.)

6. Is there any opposition to the colored people's buying land in your community?

Answer. No, 128; yes, 3; unanswered, 5.

7. Has education improved the morals of the black race?

Answer. Yes, 97; no, 20; unanswered, 19.

8. Has it made his religion less emotional and more practical?

Answer. Yes, 101; no, 16; unanswered, 19.

9. Is it, as a rule, the ignorant or the educated who commit crime?