These white people are beginning to see the difference between the value of an educated Negro and one who is not educated. It is for you to demonstrate to them this value more and more clearly every year.
SUBSTANCE vs. SHADOW
You are here for the purpose of getting an education. Now, one of the results of an education is to increase a person's wants. You take the ordinary person who lives on a plantation, and so long as that person is ignorant, he is content to live in a cabin with one room, in which he has a skillet, a bedstead—or an apology for one—a table, and a few chairs or stools. He is content if he has fat meat, corn bread and peas on the table to eat, and for clothing he is satisfied to wear jeans and osnaburg himself, and to have his wife wear a calico dress and a twenty-five cent hat.
But, as soon as that man becomes educated, he feels that he must have a house with at least two or three rooms in it, furnished with neat and substantial furniture. Instead of jeans and osnaburg for clothes, he wants decent woollen cloth, neat-fitting shoes, and a white collar and a necktie, things which he never thought of wearing before he became educated. Sometimes he even thinks that he must have jewellery.
So you see the result of education is to increase a person's wants. Now, the crisis in that person's affairs comes when the question arises whether his education has increased his ability to supply his wants. Such an ability, I claim, is one of the results of industrial education. By such an education as that, while we are getting culture along all the lines that in any degree tend to increase the wants of a person, we are, in the meantime, getting skill to increase our ability to supply these wants. And, unless we have this ability, we will find, sooner or later, that instead of going forward we are going backward.
I think that the temptation for us, especially for those who are only half educated, is to try to get hold of a certain kind of shallow culture, instead of getting the substantial—instead of getting hold of real education, of property and material prosperity.
You who study history know how the Pilgrim Fathers, who landed at Plymouth Rock in the bleak winter of 1620, were willing to wear homespun clothes, and to be married in them, if necessary, and to have a wedding that in all would not cost more than four dollars, I suppose. On the other hand, when one of our boys wants to get married now, he must have a wedding that costs not less than one hundred and fifty dollars. His wife must have a dress with a long train, and he must have a Prince Albert, broadcloth coat that he either rents, or buys on the instalment plan. They think that they must have a bevy of waiting bridesmaids, and there must be a line of hacks standing on the outside of the church door that will cost him not less than twenty-five dollars. Then, after the ceremony, where do these people go to live? The chances are the young man who has been to all this expense for the sake of the show of it, takes his bride to live in a small cabin with only two rooms—sometimes only one room—rented at that.