INDUSTRIAL TRAINING.

Schools in which industries are taught16
Special industrial teachers10
Teachers combining industrial with other work21

Industrial teaching is made prominent at Santee, Oahe, at all of our chartered institutions, at Le Moyne Institute, Memphis, Tenn., Lewis High School, Macon, Ga., and incidentally at six other schools. Aid has been received from the Slater Fund for this work at Macon, Atlanta, Nashville, Tougaloo, Talladega, Memphis and Austin. Nearly all the scholars in attendance pursue some of the branches of industry taught. Housekeeping, cooking, dress-making, care of the sick, agriculture, blacksmithing, harness-making, type-setting and printing are made prominent, according to the conveniences at hand. Atlanta, Talladega and Tougaloo have farms which are worked by the students under the instruction of practical farmers. At several other points farming could be successfully taught if only we had the farms, and we could have the farms if only we had the money.

For the teaching of the trades we need special buildings. Progress has been made in this direction. Atlanta University has erected "The Knowles Industrial Building," a memorial of the late Mr. L. J. Knowles, of Worcester, Mass., whose widow not long before her death appropriated $6,000 for this object. It is a brick building 100 by 44 feet, with two stories and a basement, and, for its use, is one of the finest in the South. At Macon, a two-story building has been constructed—the upper story for the Lewis Library and the lower for a carpenter shop. At Talladega has been also built a two-story structure, the upper story to be used for carpentry and the lower for blacksmithing. The citizens of Memphis two years ago gave Professor Steele $1,000 to put a girl's industrial department into the Le Moyne school, and now they have pledged him $600 more to secure a workshop for the boys. Fort Berthold in Dakota and Fisk and Straight Universities at the South greatly need industrial buildings, and there are other schools of which the same might be said with equal emphasis.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of industrial training. Latest in development in connection with our schools, it may yet prove first in value. Labor is heaven-ordained. It is the chief instrumentality through which a people are elevated. Grace saves the soul and transforms character instantly. It makes the savage and sinner kind and good instantly; but it will not instantly make him a good farmer, a skilled mechanic, a trained scholar. Up from the lowest to the highest, man must toil patiently and laboriously. Nature will tolerate neither jumps nor deceptions. It is no kindness to put a man where he is out of place, and still less is it a kindness to make him believe that he has a right to be there. He who climbs up into position or who is foisted into it by any other instrumentality than by the toil necessary to fit him for the position, the same is a thief and a robber. The police forces of Nature will speedily put him under arrest. The judicial forces of Nature will soon cast him into a prison, out of which he shall not come until beginning at the bottom, by diligent labor, he is willing to pay the last farthing at every step in the process of his advancement. The implements and the products of industry are the gauges of civilization. Between the roughly-hewn stone hatchet and the finely-polished steel axe lies all the history of the world's progress. The college, the library, the fine residence and the factory of modern civilization are at one end of the line, the other end of which starts from the dug-out and the hut. Man, in the highest estate, forget or ignore it as he may, has that in him which connects him with the lowest, and labor, the hard labor of his ancestors, extending through the ages as well as his own, has been the means of bringing him where he is. If the Indian and the negro are to be elevated, they must rise by the same steps as have others. They must work their way up. But they who are above them, remembering the pit out of which they themselves have been dug, must give them a chance to rise, and help them as they try to rise. That they have the capacity for elevation along every line of human development has been abundantly proved over and over again. The industrial exhibit of the colored people at the recent Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, was in every way gratifying to their friends. Though these people are only 20 years out of the house of their 250 years' bondage, antedated by millenniums of barbarism, they sent articles showing their progress in the industries that more than filled the entire gallery assigned them in one end of the immense Government building.