"Hampton institute has chosen a fitting occasion, the completion of fifty years of life and work, to issue the history of its achievement. It comes at the end of one distinct epoch, and the beginning of another, when it is of much value to consider the results which make a foundation for new progress. It is a record of wonderful achievement, and this amazing institution may well be proud of it. We are led from the huddled camp of contrabands in 1868 to the allied armies in 1918; from a crowd of men and women without a past and seemingly without a future—even a possibility only to the eyes of patriotism and faith—we are led in these pages to the ranks of efficient soldiers and brilliant officers fighting with southern men whose grandfathers called their grandfathers slaves!
"Faith has become pride and patriotism has become an individual possession in a resurrected race. The book might well have been called by that title—'The Resurrection of a Race'—but its distinguished author, in calling it 'Education for Life,' has chosen to consider Hampton's double mission to the race and to the world in connection with education. This latter aspect of its work makes the book particularly pertinent at this time of world reconstruction. This attractive volume will be read with interest and satisfaction by the many widespread friends of Hampton Institute, and it will also be sought with eagerness by another audience, the large public, which is seeking new theories of education for a new world. This group will find it a clear and compelling statement of a new philosophy of education worked out there, heretofore neither recognized nor understood outside, but limited either to manual training or vocational education.
"Hampton has been fortunate in its biographer. It is a labor of love, by Rev. Francis G. Peabody, one of the few remaining trustees whose service covers its three epochs and whose friendship has inspired its three principals. Perhaps no one else has so entered into the life of the place. He has made himself one with pupils and faculty and trustees and public in such friendly fashion that he may rightly say 'we' from any point of view. His many readers will look for noteworthy diction amounting to a new use of words, grace of speech and charm of phrase, a startling power of insight, a passion for social service and the revelation of the spiritual in all human affairs, with the inspiration which compels. These things Dr. Peabody's readers expect of him, but it might have been questioned whether he could write a history. In this book he has shown us that history is the story of life, and he has used all these abilities to discover and fitly express the life which has become Hampton Institute. Not the least of all his skill has appeared in what he has left out—so that the book is never dull though it is crowded with facts. Everything is here that is needed to answer the questions of any objector, and what is more difficult, of any friend. The illustrations are not only interesting, but valuable footnotes to history, and there are a number of collections of statistics at the end of the book of incomparable worth to the student of these subjects; we cannot enough commend their range and selection.
"Among the rest, we notice a just commendation of the Hampton Club in this city. All through the book explanation forestalls objection, while old friends find new information and new reasons for half-understood methods. Such are the accumulating exposition of the Hampton idea, and the description of circumstances and resources which condition all action, and determine the measure of progress. Those who know and love this wonderful place will be gratified at the stress laid on the 'Hampton spirit' of service as the explanation of its success, as well as the constant recognition of the spiritual in the methods as well as the aims of this hothouse of missionary effort. No one familiar with the school would have found the record complete without the stressing of this element at once its motive and its life. Few could have so well defined that elusive but forceful thing—'the Hampton spirit.'
"It needed all the writer's ability to set forth fitly the ardent Armstrong and the able Frissell—witness his success in this characterization of them:
"'Never were two administrative officers more unlike each other. Armstrong was impetuous, magnetic, volcanic; Frissell was reserved, sagacious, prudent. The gifts of the one were those of action; the strength of the other was in discretion.'
"He has given us all fresh knowledge of both men. By his choice and collocation of extracts he shows Armstrong not only to have had the enthusiastic impact on his world known to all men, but also a forelooking philosophy which guided him to a definite end. He brings out the long line of unusual circumstances which prepared him for this work, and in repeating the vision in which like a Hebrew prophet the young officer was called to teach the Negroes, the writer shows that work to have been a definite growth. No one who knew Samuel C. Armstrong can ever forget him, or ever describe him, but not one of his wide circle ever failed to be moved by any contact with him to put forth his own powers to their full measure.
"Dr. Peabody does full justice to the help and service of the Freedmen's Bureau, which from the first linked the institution with the government, and to the American Missionary Association, which made its beginning possible. He further shows many missionary and philanthropic sources upon which it has always drawn. If he halts a little in enthusiastic justice to Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, who began this crusade, he has evidently done it best—an unexpected best it must be said, from a Harvard professor! Samuel Armstrong was moved by his Christian impulses and missionary inheritance to help these needy people, but there could hardly have been a more unpromising opportunity.
"The task which Armstrong took up was greater than the present generation can imagine. Dr. Peabody has recognized this by a clear and dispassionate description of the situation in 1868, an analysis of the greatest value to the present-day reader. Armstrong's high courage and faith brought him to the day when he saw the race well on the high road to its place in the sun, before he dropped his mantle on the shoulders of his successor. It is doubtful, perhaps, whether he saw clearly how much he had done nor how firmly he had established his principles of the necessity of work and respect for it. Dr. Peabody brings out very distinctly this his great achievement, but it is superfluous to quote from a story which everyone will want to read for himself.
"Mindful of the fact that education depends upon personal contact, this book deals largely with the work of the two outstanding personalities, who have made the institution what it is. Hollis Burke Frissell, who took up the work of principal when Armstrong left it twenty-five years ago—'Dr. Frissell' as everyone knew him—proved to be in some ways one of the great men of his time, certainly so if you give a high value to education. As one of his close friends has said of him, 'He invariably grew to the measure of the stature that his work called for.'