TEMPERANCE TEXT-BOOKS IN OUR SCHOOLS.
Our institutions have always been temperance societies. Mr. John M. Stearns, Sec. of the Nat. Temp. Soc., at its recent annual meeting, reporting his tour through the South, said that, as he was talking to the students at Fisk University, Prof. Spence reported that every student was required to sign the total abstinence pledge or to leave the institution. At Atlanta University, he found that all of the 310 students had signed the same pledge; and this is also true of all our other schools. Then our students, as they go everywhere in their vacations, become temperance propagandists, organizing societies, circulating the literature of the reform and securing signatures to the pledge. But, during the past year, our Executive Committee have thought to take a step forward, and so have voted to require the use of some temperance text-book in all our schools. Mr. Stearns found them introduced into many, and by another year they will be found in all. The Atlanta University has already had Dr. Richardson’s Temperance Lesson Book in use for two or three years, to the highest satisfaction of all concerned. The examination of the class in this book in the presence of the State Board of Examiners was pronounced by a visitor the best temperance lecture he had ever heard. Let such text-books go into all the schools of the South, and they will hasten on a revolution.
The Roanoke Collegian, of Salem, Va., referring to the John F. Slater Fund, says: “The most needed right of the negro now is his ability to write.”