May I offer one suggestion which observation a few years since among the freedmen and much reflection, with comparisons made in foreign countries, have impressed upon me?  It is this, that the key of the future for the black men of the South is industrial education.  The laboring men of other lands cannot hold their own in skilled labor save as they receive such education, and this of a constantly advancing type.  The English House of Commons moved two years since for a Royal Commission to study the technical schools of the continent, and the report respecting France made by this commission has been republished at Washington by the United States Commissioner of Education.  In our two leading northwestern cities, St. Louis and Chicago, splendid manual training-schools have been formed, and east and west the question of elementary manual training in public schools is up for discussion and decision.  All this for white laboring men.  As long ago as December, 1879, the Legislature of Tennessee authorized a brief manual of the Elementary Principles of Agriculture to be “taught in the public schools of the State,” for the benefit of white farmers again.  The Professor of Chemistry in the Vanderbilt University, Nashville, prepared the book—­107 pages.  Where in all this is there anything for the educational improvement of the black laborer just where he needs education most?  The labor of the South is subject in these years to a marvelous revolution.  The only opportunity the freedman has to rise is by furnishing such skilled labor as the great changes going on in that splendid section of the land require.  How can he furnish it, unless the education given him is chiefly industrial and technical?  Some very pertinent statements of the situation are made in the Princeton Review for May.  They confirm all that you have said.[12] As to the various bills before Congress, the writer says:  “Immediate assistance should be rendered to the ex-slave States in the development of an education suited to their political and industrial needs.”  Can this be an education in Latin and Greek?"(The writer contends earnestly for retaining these studies in classical college and academy courses for students of all colors.) Can it be anything else than training in elementary industry, such as is now demanded for our Northern common-schools?  If the denominational freedmen’s schools find this a necessity, is it anything less for the Southern public schools act which is contemplated in the bills before Congress?

Mr. Magoun reasons wisely.  If the colored men of the South are to continue their grip as the wage-workers and wealth-producers of that section they must bring to their employments common intelligence and skill; and these are to be obtained in the South as in the North, by apprenticeship and in schools specially provided for the purpose.  Instead of spending three to seven years in mastering higher education, which presupposes favorable conditions, colored youth should spend those years in acquiring a “common school education,” and in mastering some trade by which to make an honest livelihood when they step forth into the world of fierce competition.