Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 4.djvu/412

378 where school is kept only three months in the year. A large portion of the colored country population is therefore still lamentably ignorant.

The most unsatisfactory feature of their condition as a class is a disinclination to work, shown by many of their young people who have grown up since the abolition of slavery. There is said to be a notion spreading among them that it is the aim and end of education to enable people to get on without work. This tendency is exciting a prejudice against the education of negroes not only among certain classes of whites, but also with some of the more thrifty among the negroes themselves. I heard of a prosperous negro farmer in Alabama owning a well-stocked farm of 500 acres, worked by him with his children, who refuses to send his boys to school because learning would spoil them for farm work, and who permitted only one of his girls to learn reading and writing, so that she might be able to keep his accounts. Here is a field for missionary work, which those whose public spirit is devoted to the elevation of the colored race should keep well in view. The relation of grammar to industry must be made tangible to the young mind, as it is at the Hampton Institute and several others. The addition of industrial teaching to the common school is in this respect of especial importance. Among those who have been slaves there are a great many skillful mechanics—blacksmiths, carpenters, harness-makers, shoe makers, etc. Their sons, raised in freedom, seem to be less inclined to devote themselves to these laborious trades; and yet the negro, with his mechanical aptitudes, might, properly trained and guided, furnish the South all the handicraftsmen necessary for ordinary work. As it is, the negroes constitute, and will for a long period to come continue to constitute, the bulk of the agricultural laboring force in the principal cotton States, and every