Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/814

792 of training, to be successful, must be symmetrical, and must take into account the equal development of heart, hand, and head. It was to work out this theory that he consented to take charge of the school for freedmen which was gradually evolved from the camp at Hampton. Here, on the spot rich in historical memories, where freedom first came to the slave through Benjamin F. Butler's famous order declaring him contraband of war, on the shores of the broad bay where the Monitor and the Merrimac closed in their deadly embrace, General Armstrong opened his educational campaign. It was not the first time he had thought of such a scheme.

"A day-dream of the Hampton School nearly as it is," he says, "had come to me during the war a few times; once in camp during the siege of Richmond, and once one beautiful evening on the Gulf of Mexico, while on the wheel-house of the transfer steamship Illinois, en route for Texas, with the Twenty-fifth Army (negro) Corps for frontier duty on the Rio Grande River, whither it had been ordered, under General Sheridan, to watch and if necessary defeat Maximilian in his attempted conquest of Mexico.

"The thing to be done was clear: to train selected negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people, first by example, by getting land and homes; to give them not a dollar that they could earn for themselves; to teach respect for labor; to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands; and, to these ends, to build up an industrial system, for the sake not only of self-support and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character. And it seemed equally clear that the people of the country would support a wise work for the freedmen."

Time has more than justified his foresight. It has proved his plan not alone a wise way, but the only way out of the difficulty. This is the answer to the question, What kind of education is best for the negroes? First, such an industrial training as shall make them masters of their own faculties; then an economic training teaching them how to save and how to spend money; and afterward as high an intellectual education as they shall show capacity and desire for. That will take care of itself. The first essential in making the blacks independent is to make them home-owners and property-holders. This is not a difficult task, for the negroes have a land hunger. The difficulty lies in their improvident habits, which too often result in mortgaged houses and farms.

The emancipation of the slaves in America threatened to follow the same course as the emancipation of the serfs in Russia, where the boons of liberty turned to a calamity and a curse. Slavery, under masters made often considerate by habit, was exchanged for an industrial slavery far more bitter. The