The American system of education proceeds upon a false and pernicious assumption; and, while I protest against its application generally, I protest, in this connection, against its application in the case of the colored youth in particular.  What the colored boy, what all boys of the country need, is industrial not ornamental education; shall they have it?  Let the State and the philanthropists answer.

FOOTNOTES: 

[12] Judge Tourgee has for years been urgently and admirably writing in advocacy of National Aid in Southern Education.

CHAPTER VII

How Not to Do It

Revolutions are always the outgrowth of deepest wrongs, clearly defined by long and heated agitation, which inflame the mind of the people, and divide them into hostile factions.  The field of battle is simply the theater upon which the hostile factions decide by superior prowess, or numbers, or sagacity, the questions at issue.  In these conflicts, right usually, but not invariably, triumphs, as it should always do.  Revolutions quicken the conscience and intelligence of the people, and wars purify the morals of the people by weeding out the surplus and desperate members of the population; just as a thunderstorm clarifies the atmosphere.

But the problems involved in the agitation which culminated in the War of the Rebellion are to-day as far from solution as if no shot had been fired upon Fort Sumter or as if no Lee had laid down traitorous arms four years thereafter.

The giant form of the slave-master, the tyrant, still rises superior to law, to awe and oppress the unorganized proletariat—­the common people, the laboring class.  Even when slavery was first introduced into this country, Fate had written upon the walls of the nation that it “must go,” and go it must, as the result of wise statesmanship or amid the smoke of battle and the awful “diapason of cannonade.”  No man can tell whether wisdom will dictate further argument of peaceful, or there must be found a violent, solution; but all men of passable intelligence know and feel that justice will prevail.  Progress goes forward ever, backward never.

That human intelligence has reached higher ground within the present century than it ever before attained, goes without saying.  That we have marvelously improved upon all the mechanism of government is equally true.  But whether we have improved upon the time-honored rules of dealing with rebels by extending to them general amnesty for all their sins of commission is seriously to be debated.  If we may judge of the proper treatment of treason by the example which, according to Milton, High Heaven made of Lucifer, amnesty is a failure; if we may judge by the almost absolute failure of the results of the war of the Rebellion, we may emphatically pronounce amnesty to be a noxious weed which should not be permitted to take too firm a rooting in our dealing with traitors.  Human, it may be, to err, and to forgive Divine; but for man to extend forgiveness too far is positively fatal.  Examples are not wanting to show the truthfulness of the reasoning.