Out of little, unspoiled souls rise up wonderful resources and healing balm.  Once the colored child understands the white world’s attitude and the shameful wrong of it, you have furnished it with a great life motive,—­a power and impulse toward good which is the mightiest thing man has.  How many white folk would give their own souls if they might graft into their children’s souls a great, moving, guiding ideal!

With this Power there comes, in the transfiguring soul of childhood, the Glory:  the vision of accomplishment, the lofty ideal.  Once let the strength of the motive work, and it becomes the life task of the parent to guide and to shape the ideal; to raise it from resentment and revenge to dignity and self-respect, to breadth and accomplishment, to human service; to beat back every thought of cringing and surrender.

Here, at last, we can speak with no hesitation, with no lack of faith.  For we know that as the world grows better there will be realized in our children’s lives that for which we fight unfalteringly, but vainly now.

So much for the problem of the home and our own dark children.  Now let us look beyond the pale upon the children of the wide world.  What is the real lesson of the life of Coleridge-Taylor?  It is this:  humanly speaking it was sheer accident that this boy developed his genius.  We have a right to assume that hundreds and thousands of boys and girls today are missing the chance of developing unusual talents because the chances have been against them; and that indeed the majority of the children of the world are not being systematically fitted for their life work and for life itself.  Why?

Many seek the reason in the content of the school program.  They feverishly argue the relative values of Greek, mathematics, and manual training, but fail with singular unanimity in pointing out the fundamental cause of our failure in human education:  That failure is due to the fact that we aim not at the full development of the child, but that the world regards and always has regarded education first as a means of buttressing the established order of things rather than improving it.  And this is the real reason why strife, war, and revolution have marked the onward march of humanity instead of reason and sound reform.  Instead of seeking to push the coming generation ahead of our pitiful accomplishment, we insist that it march behind.  We say, morally, that high character is conformity to present public opinion; we say industrially that the present order is best and that children must be trained to perpetuate it.

But, it is objected, what else can we do?  Can we teach Revolution to the inexperienced in hope that they may discern progress?  No, but we may teach frankly that this world is not perfection, but development:  that the object of education is manhood and womanhood, clear reason, individual talent and genius and the spirit of service and sacrifice, and not simply a frantic effort to avoid change in present institutions; that industry is for man and not man for industry and that while we must have workers to work, the prime object of our training is not the work but the worker—­not the maintenance of present industrial caste but the development of human intelligence by which drudgery may be lessened and beauty widened.