And the future?  These were the ambitious youths of the race, at work with an earnestness that put to shame the conventional student life of most educational institutions.  Another song rolled up along the rafters.  And as soon as silence came, I found myself in front of this extraordinary mass of faces, thinking not of them, but of that long and unhappy chapter in our country’s history which followed the one great structural mistake of the Fathers of the Republic; thinking of the one continuous great problem that generations of statesmen had wrangled over, and a million men fought about, and that had so dwarfed the mass of English men in the Southern States as to hold them back a hundred years behind their fellows in every other part of the world—­in England, in Australia, and in the Northern and Western States; I was thinking of this dark shadow that had oppressed every large-minded statesman from Jefferson to Lincoln.  These thousand young men and women about me were victims of it.  I, too, was an innocent victim of it.  The whole Republic was a victim of that fundamental error of importing Africa into America.  I held firmly to the first article of my faith that the Republic must stand fast by the principle of a fair ballot; but I recalled the wretched mess that Reconstruction had made of it; I recalled the low level of public life in all the “black” States.  Every effort of philanthropy seemed to have miscarried, every effort at correcting abuses seemed of doubtful value, and the race friction seemed to become severer.  Here was the century-old problem in all its pathos seated singing before me.  Who were the more to be pitied—­these innocent victims of an ancient wrong, or I and men like me, who had inherited the problem?  I had long ago thrown aside illusions and theories, and was willing to meet the facts face to face, and to do whatever in God’s name a man might do towards saving the next generation from such a burden.  But I felt the weight of twenty well-nigh hopeless years of thought and reading and observation; for the old difficulties remained and new ones had sprung up.  Then I saw clearly that the way out of a century of blunders had been made by this man who stood beside me and was introducing me to this audience.  Before me was the material he had used.  All about me was the indisputable evidence that he had found the natural line of development.  He had shown the way.  Time and patience and encouragement and work would do the rest.

It was then more clearly than ever before that I understood the patriotic significance of Mr. Washington’s work.  It is this conception of it and of him that I have ever since carried with me.  It is on this that his claim to our gratitude rests.

To teach the Negro to read, whether English, or Greek, or Hebrew, butters no parsnips.  To make the Negro work, that is what his master did in one way and hunger has done in another; yet both these left Southern life where they found it.  But to teach the Negro to do skilful work, as men of all the races that have risen have worked,—­responsible work, which is education and character; and most of all when Negroes so teach Negroes to do this that they will teach others with a missionary zeal that puts all ordinary philanthropic efforts to shame,—­this is to change the whole economic basis of life and the whole character of a people.