Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/818

796 brass buttons, is dear to his heart. His feet keep step instinctively to the tap of the drum, and the flag behind which he marches is a perpetual reminder to him that he is an integral part of a great nation which expects something from him in return for the freedom and citizenship which it has bestowed. This military drill has a still more far-reaching influence in stimulating that ability for organization which is one of the latest developments of civilization. Here the negro is manifestly deficient. He fights and works well under the command and oversight of his superior, just as the Sepoys have been found in India to need not only English officers but a few English regulars to supply the backbone as well as the brains—literally, the sinews of war. This mental and moral muscle is just what Hampton is supplying, teaching the negro first to help himself and then to lend a hand to others, to organize, to teach, and to command.

The normal school is the highest grade in the Hampton Institute. It has four classes—the intermediate, the junior, the middle, and the senior. At the end of the middle year the students who desire to make teaching their life work are sent away for a year of practice, from which they return with a more adequate notion of the needs of their people and the advantages open to them at Hampton. So much insisted on is this duty of missionary work of instruction in the Black Belt and other strongholds of ignorance in the South, that the teachers say that the graduates whom they meet in New York and other Northern cities occupying positions of ease and profit are so ashamed of shirking their duties that they cross the street and strive to avoid encountering their old instructors, whose just expectations they have thus disappointed.

Every institution, some one has said, is the shadow of one man, and Hampton is the shadow of General Armstrong. He has been not alone the founder, but the upbuilder. It is his eloquence which has drawn forth the gold from the pockets of the rich and transformed it into brick and mortar and books and models for the benefit of his experiment.

Phillips Brooks, whose great heart went out to all greatness, said of General Armstrong: "He has touched the fountains of generosity in stingy men. He has taught men the glory and the beauty and the happiness of being stewards of the Lord. He has made men feel as they never dreamed of feeling. Such has been the power of his speech that the frozen streams have melted and the currents have flowed joyously, singing as they went, and men have thanked him for teaching them to be generous." But no one man, however eloquent or however able, could have created that industrial village at Hampton. It is the product of organized enthusiasm. Individual enthusiasm is the old flint and