The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe

by Booker T. Washington; Robert Ezra Park

There, as elsewhere, education is seeking to reach and touch every class and every individual of every class in the community. The deaf, the blind, the defectives of every description are now beginning to receive industrial education fitting them for trades in which they will be more useful to the community and more independent than it was possible for them to be when no attempt was made to fit them for any place in the life of the community.

The effect of this movement, or revolution, as I have called it, is not to "tear down and level up" in order to bring about an artificial equality, but to give every individual a chance "to make good," to determine for himself his place and position in the community by the character and quality of the service he is able to perform.

One effect of this change in point of view which I have described is that to-day there is hardly any one thing in which the people of Europe are more concerned than in the progress and future of the man farthest down.

In all that I have written in the preceding chapters I have sought to emphasize, in the main, two things: first, that behind all the movements which have affected the masses of the people, Socialism or nationalism, emigration, the movements for the reorganization of city and country life, there has always been the Underman, groping his way upward, struggling to rise; second, that the effect of all that has been done to lift the man at the bottom, or to encourage him to lift himself, has been to raise the level of every man above him.

If it is true, as I have so often said, that one man cannot hold another down in the ditch without staying down in the ditch with him, it is just as true that, in helping the man who is down to rise, the man who is up is freeing himself from a burden that would else drag him down. It is because the world seems to realize this fact more and more that, beyond and above all local and temporary difficulties, the future of the man farthest down looks bright.

And now at the conclusion of my search for the man farthest down in Europe let me confess that I did not succeed in finding him. I did not succeed in reaching any place in Europe where conditions were so bad that I did not hear of other places, which friends advised me to visit, where conditions were a great deal worse. My own experience was, in fact, very much like that of a certain gentleman who came South some years ago to study the condition of the Negro people. He had heard that in many parts of the South the Negro was gradually sinking back into something like African savagery, and he was particularly desirous of finding a well-defined example of this relapse into barbarism. He started out with high hopes and a very considerable fund of information as to what he might expect to find and as to the places where he might hope to find it. Everywhere he went in his search, however, he found that he had arrived a few years too late. He found at every place he visited people who were glad to tell him the worst there was to be known about the coloured people; some were even kind enough to show what they thought was about the worst there was to be found among the Negroes in their particular part of the country. Still he was disappointed because he never found anything that approached the conditions he was looking for, and usually he was compelled to be contented with the statement, made to him by each one of his guides in turn, which ran something like this: "Conditions were not near as bad as they had been. A few years ago, if he had happened to have come that way, he would have been able to see things, and so forth; but now conditions were improving. However, if he wanted to see actual barbarism he should visit"—and then they usually named some distant part of the country with which he had not yet become acquainted.

In this way this gentleman, who was hunting the worst that was to be seen among the Negroes, as I was hunting the worst that was to be seen among the people of Europe, travelled all over the Southern States, going from one dark corner to another, but never finding things as bad as they were advertised. Instead of that, backward as the people were in many of the remote parts of the country, he found, just as I did in Europe, that everywhere the people were making progress. In some places they were advancing more slowly than they were in others, but everywhere there was, on the whole, progress rather than decline. The result in his case was the same as it had been in mine, the farther he went and the more he saw of the worst there was to see, the more hopeful he became of the people as a whole.

I saw much that was primitive and much that was positively evil in the conditions in Europe, but nowhere did I find things as bad as they were described to me by persons who knew them as they were some years before. And I found almost no part of the country in which substantial progress had not been made; no place, in short, where the masses of the people were without hope.

It will, perhaps, seem curious to many persons that, after I had gone to Europe for the express purpose of making the acquaintance of the people at the bottom, and of seeing, as far as I was able, the worst in European life, I should have returned with a hopeful rather than a pessimistic view of what I saw.