6. Means must be instituted to prevent the too common habit of withdrawing the Negro child from school at so early an age to help support the family. These and such other measures as close scrutiny may from time to time suggest must be employed to make the public school system among the Negroes what it ought to be.
IN THE UPPER REALMS.
It is not enough to provide elementary training for our people. The great minds of earth choose the devious pathways to be threaded by the wavering feet of humanity. They pass upon what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, what is expedient and what is inexpedient. Tremendous is the influence that has been exerted on human history by the teachings of the great.
Through the training of the intellect the Negroes must develop men capable of interpreting and influencing world movements, men able to adjust the race to any new conditions that may arise. We need men to do for the Negro race what Prof. Henry Drummond sought to do for the Christian religion. In the upper chamber of the house of human knowledge, the congress of scientists presided over by Charles Darwin, and representing the culture of the ages, met to promulgate a new religion; a religion that would establish Nature as our ethical teacher, pointing with the finger of evolution, the way for man to go. By dint of patient, faithful labor and notable achievements in the realm of science, Prof. Drummond secured admittance into this upper chamber and took his seat at the council table. Soon the world heard his voice proclaiming in the tone of one speaking with authority that the new revelations of science contained no poison for Christianity; that the new teacher, Nature, was the friend, not the enemy, of the old teacher, the Bible. He declared that Evolution and Christianity have "the same author, the same end and the same spirit."
Thus Drummond was on hand to seek to stay the Darwinian hand, if, after shattering other conceptions, it had attempted to demolish the one worship that modern civilization has thus far failed to destroy.
To prepare Negroes for taking care of our interests in the realms of highest thought, our racial organization must found universities, liberally endow scholarships, provide equipments for original investigations and so foster the cause of higher education that no race can boast of superior intellectual attainments.
"OF MAKING MANY BOOKS THERE IS NO END."
Books are the means by which each successive generation comes into possession of the best (of which the records have been kept) that was wrought during all preceding generations of human endeavor. Not only does the art of printing thus connect with all that was good in the past, but it also affords a man the opportunity of becoming a part of all that is being done in his day.