But to return to education.  It should always be fitted to the stage of development.  It should always mean discipline, the training of the powers and capacities.  The early pioneers who planted civilization on the Watauga, the Holston, the Kentucky, the Cumberland, had not much broad learning—­they would not have been worse if they had had more but they had courage, they were trained in self-reliance, virile common sense, and good judgment, they had inherited the instinct and capacity of self-government, they were religious, with all their coarseness they had the fundamental elements of nobility, the domestic virtues, and the public spirit needed in the foundation of states.  Their education in all the manly arts and crafts of the backwoodsman fitted them very well for the work they had to do.  I should say that the education of the colored race in America should be fundamental.  I have not much confidence in an ornamental top-dressing of philosophy, theology, and classic learning upon the foundation of an unformed and unstable mental and moral condition.  Somehow, character must be built up, and character depends upon industry, upon thrift, upon morals, upon correct ethical perceptions.  To have control of one’s powers, to have skill in labor, so that work in any occupation shall be intelligent, to have self-respect, which commonly comes from trained capacity, to know how to live, to have a clean, orderly house, to be grounded in honesty and the domestic virtues,—­these are the essentials of progress.  I suppose that the education to produce these must be an elemental and practical one, one that fits for the duties of life and not for some imaginary sphere above them.

To put it in a word, and not denying that there must be schools for teaching the teachers, with the understanding that the teachers should be able to teach what the mass most needs to know—­what the race needs for its own good today, are industrial and manual training schools, with the varied and practical discipline and arts of life which they impart.

What then?  What of the ‘modus vivendi’ of the two races occupying the same soil?  As I said before, I do not know.  Providence works slowly.  Time and patience only solve such enigmas.  The impossible is not expected of man, only that he shall do today the duty nearest to him.  It is easy, you say, for an outsider to preach waiting, patience, forbearance, sympathy, helpfulness.  Well, these are the important lessons we get out of history.  We struggle, and fume, and fret, and accomplish little in our brief hour, but somehow the world gets on.  Fortunately for us, we cannot do today the work of tomorrow.  All the gospel in the world can be boiled down into a single precept.  Do right now.  I have observed that the boy who starts in the morning with a determination to behave himself till bedtime, usually gets through the day without a thrashing.