Then followed the whole sad story.  The musician had been interviewed and investigated.  He did not deny the serious charge to this superintendent of public proprieties.  With a heart as hard as old Pharaoh’s he proposed to go on and do more likewise.  In short, the representative of the Constitution could do nothing with this intractable professor.  Hence “he did not stand upon the order of his going, but went at once,” and reported that “according to Mr. Suiter’s own statement, he is teaching a colored class, and he has lost a white pupil, which shows that his course is hurting his business.”  “Diligent inquiry has failed to bring to light any proof that he has notified his white pupils that he is teaching colored people.”

Leaving out the meanness of this, has anyone read anything published lately more ridiculous?  It is not necessary to quote the professor’s public reply.  It simply claimed the right of manhood and common sense, and doubtless left the Constitution wondering how a man capable of making it appear so foolish could yet descend to such depths of ignominy as to teach people whose ancestors came from Africa, the unpardonable sin of singing praises to the Author of their being.  To what deeps some will descend!  Why should colored people add to the criminality of being born black, the fearful temptation of pay in advance to one who could teach them while he had pupils who had the merit of having been born white?

This was really transpiring in the city of Atlanta several days in the month of February in the year 1888, and was in successive issues of the Constitution, which shows among other things that there is latitude, if not longitude, at a Brooklyn New England dinner.  Meanwhile we think we hear Uncle Rastus quoting the prophecy, “The morning cometh and also the night,” but he can’t help laughing because it is “awful funny.”

* * * * *

 THE EDUCATIONAL WORK IN THE SOUTH.

BY REV.  W.F.  SLOCUM.

We may remember at the outset that in this matter of the education of the Negro we are treating a question which must be considered, to a certain extent, ethnically.  We are dealing with a people with race peculiarities:  but it seems to me that it is very useless to ask whether we are training an inferior stock.  There was a time when the Anglo-Saxon stock was far inferior {96} to its present condition.  We ourselves are not enough removed from heathenism and barbarism to become very pharisaical.

Here is a race with its idiosyncrasies, and its peculiar latent possibilities, which we cannot know until Christian education has unfolded them through many years.  We ought not to wonder that in many respects this people is yet in its moral and intellectual infancy; but who dares say that it has not a future before it, with its statesmen, its poets, its painters, its men of letters; that it is not to have its own peculiar