The race is improving and is capable of continued improvement, and the poor whites of our own race in the South, it goes without saying, are capable, with proper education, of what we ourselves have accomplished. We proclaim s our sole purpose the steady elevation of the ignorant of both white and black races in the South. That is the duty in behalf of which we meet to-night, with our hands and hearts outstretched to our own race in the South, beseeching its wisest leaders to advise us how we can best cooperate with them under their guidance for the genuine advancement of that portion of our common country we love so well.

Mr. CARNEGIE. Ladies and gentlemen, I have now to introduce to you one whose voice is heard upon every vital question affecting our country; and there is one merit President Eliot possesses in the highest degree—there is never any doubt where he stands. Our universities are sometimes charged with neglect of attention to civic questions, but there are none in any other country whose presidents take such leading parts in public affairs and who are such leaders of the people. Among the foremost of these ranks he whom I beg to present, President Eliot, of Harvard, our oldest university.

ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ELIOT.

There is no larger or graver problem before civilized man at this moment than the prompt formation of a sound public opinion about the right treatment of backward races, and Hampton possesses the keywords of that great problemeducation and productive labor. The support of Hampton Institute depends directly on public opinion concerning it among intelligent and public-spirited people North and South. Let these people remain convinced that Hampton not only has been but is and will be an effective instrument for uplifting the two backward races it serves, and let this conviction be as firmly and broadly planted in the Southern mind as in the Northern and the vigorous life of the institute is assured.

I therefore ask your attention to some of the resemblances and some of the differences between opinion at the North and opinion at the South concerning the negro.

In the first place, northern opinion and southern opinion are identical with regard to keeping the two races pure—that is, without admixture of one with the other. The northern whites hold this opinion quite as firmly as the southern whites; and, inasmuch as the negroes hold the same view, this supposed danger of mutual racial impairment ought not to have much influence on practical measures. Admixture of the two races, so far as it proceeds, will be, as it has been, chiefly the result of sexual vice on the part of white men ; it will not be a widespread evil; and it will not be advocated as a policy or method by anybody worthy of consideration. It should be borne in on the mind of the southern whites that their northern brethren are entirely at one with them in this matter, in spite of certain obvious differences of behavior toward the negro at the North and at the South.

Let us next consider some of these differences of practical behavior. At the North it is common for negro children to go to the public schools with white children, while at the South negro children are not admitted to white schools. This practice at the North may be justly described as socially insignificant, because the number of negro children is in most places very small in proportion to the number of white children. In northern towns where negro children are proportionally numerous there is just the same tendency and desire to separate them from the whites that there is in the South. This separation may be effected by public regulations, but if not it will be effected by white

parents procuring the transfer of their children to schools where negroes are few. The differences of practice in this matter at the North and at the South are the result of the different proportion of negroes to the white population in the two sections. Thus in the high schools and colleges of the North the proportion of negroes is always extremely small, so small that it may be neglected as a social influence. Put the prosperous northern whites into the Southern States, in immediate contact with millions of negroes and they would promptly establish separate schools for the colored population, whatever the necessary cost. Transfer the southern whites to the North, where the negroes form but an insignificant fraction of the population, and in a generation or two they would not care whether there were a few negro children in the public schools or not, and would therefore avoid the expense of providing separate schools for the few colored children.

With regard to coming into personal contact with negroes, the adverse feeling of the northern whites is stronger than that of the southern whites, who are accustomed to such contacts; but, on account of the fewness of the negroes at the North, no separate provision is made for them in public conveyances and other places of public resort. It would be inconvenient and wasteful to provide separate conveyances; and, moreover, race is not the real determining consideration in regard to agreeableness of contact in a public conveyance or other public resort. Any clean and tidy person, of whatever race, is more welcome than any dirty person, be he white, black, or yellow. Here again the proportion of the negro to the white population is a dominant consideration. On the whole, there is no essential difference between the feelings of the northern whites and the southern whites on this subject; but the uneducated northern whites are less tolerant of the negro than the southern whites. More trades and occupations are actually open to negroes in the Southern States than in the Northern.

I come next to a real difference between northern opinion and southern opinion a difference the roots of which are rather hard to trace. At the North nobody connects political equality-that is, the possession of the ballot and eligibility to public office-with social equality; that is, free social intercourse on equal terms in the people's homes. At the South the white population seems to think unanimously that there is a close connection between the two questions following: Shall a negro vote or be a letter carrier? and Shall he sit with a white man at dinner or marry a white man's sister? At the North these two questions seem to have nothing whatever to do with each other. For generations the entire male population of a suitable age has possessed the ballot; but the possession of the ballot has never had anything to do with the social status of the individual voter. In the northern cities, which generally contain a great variety of white nationalities, the social divisions are numerous and deep; and the mere practice of political equality gives no means whatever of passing from one social set to another supposed to be higher. The social sets are determined by like education, parity of income, and similarity of occupation, and not at all by the equality of every citizen before the law. Many an old New England village and many a huge tenement house in a great city at the North illustrate the sharpness and fixity of social distinctions much more strongly than the newest fashionable quarter.

The male villagers call each other John and Bill when they meet on the road or at town meeting, but their families hold themselves apart. In the tenement house families will live for years on the same staircase and yet never exchange so much as a nod. In democratic society it is only "birds of a feather that flock together," and true social mobility in a democracy is not preserved by the ballot or by any theory of the equality of all men before the law, but by public educa

tion and by the precious freedom which enables the men and women who possess remarkable natural gifts of any sort to develop and utilize those gifts. This democratic mobility is an application of the general principle that human beings of the same sort, possessing the same desires and governed by the same motives, will seek each other out and associate in the pursuit of common objects, whether at work or at play. At the North, then, people do not in the least connect political equality with social equality of intercourse. In this respect the northern people closely resemble the English and the nations of continental Europe that have introduced the ballot into their political structures. No European has ever associated the possession of the ballot with social equality. An Englishman would find such an idea utterly unintelligible. During the nineteenth century there have been successive extensions of the suffrage in England, but these extensions have not affected in the least the social classification of the English people. To the northern mind there is something positively comical in the notion that a letter carrier or a fourth-class postmaster or an alderman changes his social status or his social prospects when he attains to his office. At the North this man remains in the social position to which his education, business training, and social faculties entitle him. His fellow-citizens may form a new opinion about him from the way he does his work and from his bearing and manners, but if his social status is altered in any way it will be because his personal qualities give him a lift or a drop, and not because he holds an office by election or appointment. At the South, on the other hand, the possession of the ballot before the civil war distinguished the poor white from the black slave, and to hold public office was a highly valued mark of distinction among whites. Hence the southern whites are convinced that possession of the ballot and eligibility to public office, however humble, tend toward social equality between two races which ought not to be mixed, while nothing in the long experience of freedom among the northern whites has ever suggested to them that there is any connection between social intercourse and political equality. The southern white sees a race danger in eating at the same table with the negro; he sees in being either the host or the guest of a negro an act of race infidelity. The northern white sees nothing of the kind. The race danger does not enter into his thoughts at all; he does not believe there is any such danger. To be the host or guest of a negro, a Mexican, or a Japanese would be for him simply a matter of present pleasure, convenience, or courtesy. It would never occur to him that such an act could possibly harm his own race. His pride of race does not permit him to entertain such an idea. This is a significant difference between northern whites and southern whites. Their sentiments on this subject are really unlike so unlike that they do not understand each other. Yet their fundamental belief that the two races ought to live socially apart is precisely the same. The southern sentiment on this subject ought to be provisionally respected as a social fact, although the northern white's race feeling seems to be really much more robust than that of the southern white's. The northerner's is simply impregnable, like the self-respect of a gentleman. If the southerner when in the North could conform to northern practice, and the northerner when in the South to southern practice, each without losing caste at home, an amiable modus vivendi would be secured.

Again, the northern whites and the southern do not entirely agree with regard to public education. Northern opinion is unanimous in favor of giving the whole southern population-white and black alike good opportunities for education in every grade, though in separate establishments. It seems to the northern whites that if the southern negroes are to constitute a separate community-separate, that is, with regard to church, school, and all social lifethat separate community will need not only industrious laborers and operatives,

active clerks, and good mechanics, but also teachers, preachers, lawyers, physicians, engineers, and indeed professional men of all sorts, and therefore that all grades of education should be made accessible to negro children and youth.

On this subject three different opinions may be discerned among southern whites. Some southern whites, educated and uneducated, think that any education is an injury to the negro race, and that the negro should continue to multiply in the Southern States with access only to the lowest forms of labor, for which they maintain, as Plato did, that no education is necessary. Another section of the southern whites holds that negro children should be educated, but only for manual occupations--that is, for farm work, household work, and work in the fundamental trades, such as the carpenter's, mason's, and blacksmith's. This section approves of manual training and trade schools, but takes no interest in the higher education of the negro. Still a third section of the southern whites recognizes the obvious fact that a separate negro community must be provided with negro professional men of good quality, else neither the physical nor the moral welfare of the negro population will be thoroughly provided for. At the North the higher education of the few young negroes who will reach that grade can be provided in the colleges and professional schools maintained for white youth and is successfully given at this moment to a few negro youth. In the Southern States the higher education must be given in separate institutions, if at all. The northern people hardly realize how heavy the educational burden on the Southern States really is, because at the North they are under no necessity of providing separate institutions of all grades for negroes in addition to those provided for the whites. The pecuniary burden of this separate provision on the relatively poor Southern States is enormous; it is heavy in the elementary schools, but in the higher grades of education it is heavier still in proportion to the numbers to be educated. The provision of a higher education for negroes is the logical consequence of the proposition that the black and white races should both be kept pure; and, as I have said, this proposition is accepted both at the North and at the South. The alternative view, that the negro needs no education, or is harmed by it, or that the race should only be offered the lower grades of education, is thoroughly inconsistent with the proposition that the two races should be kept unmixed. Democratic society can not possibly contemplate the permanent presence of millions of a race but recently delivered from slavery breeding fast and left in ignorance, or even without guidance and incentives to intellectual and spiritual life. Such a suggestion flies in the face of all democratic thought about public justice, liberty, and even safety.

The northern whites have precisely the same dread of an ignorant and corruptible suffrage that the southern whites feel, for they have suffered and are now suffering from it. Millions of immigrants, who have had no practice in civil or religious liberty, have invaded the North, and negro suffrage there has often proved not only unintelligent but mercenary. Their remedy, however, for an ignorant suffrage is to abolish ignorance by patient, generous work on the children. As an aid in this long campaign they value an educational qualification for the suffrage. Moreover, the northern people are having at home abundant illustration of the way crimes increase when portions of the population have emancipated themselves from accustomed restraints, but have not yet been provided with any new effective restraints either from within or from without. In this respect they are prepared to sympathize warmly with their southern brethren, whose situation is even more difficult than their own. Both parts of the country are feeling acutely the same need-the need of a stronger arm for the law, of a permanent, large, pervasive police force, organized in military fashion and provided with all the best means for instantaneous com

munication between stations. The presence of a competent public force would tend to prevent those sudden gregarious panics which cause lawless barbarities.

In respect to the value of that peculiar form of education which Hampton Institute has so admirably illustrated-education through manual training and labor at trades and crafts-there is a striking agreement between northern and southern opinion. One of the most remarkable changes in public education in the northern States during the past fifteen years has been the rapid introduetion of just these features into urban school systems.

The northern whites are beginning to sympathize strongly with their southern brethren in respect to the peculiar burden which the action of the national Government in liberating the negroes has imposed on them. They see that the educational problem at the South is much more difficult than it is at the North and calls for much greater public expenditure. They also perceive that the Southern States are less able than the Northern States to endure public expenditure for education.

In spite of their ingrained preference for local control of education, and for local government in general-a preference which has preserved far too long ward government for schools and cities and district government in country towns—they are beginning to feel that the peculiar burden upon the Southern States, caused by the separation between the black and the white races in the institutions of education, should be borne in part by the National Government. They would like to see devised constitutional means of bringing exceptional aid from the National Treasury to the former slave States which have this exceptional burden to bear. They would like to see the negro schools of the South kept eight months of the year instead of four—at the expense of the nation. They would like to see separate colleges for agriculture and the mechanic arts provided throughout the South by the National Government. They would like to see the southern universities enabled to maintain separate professional schools for cǝlored men. They would like to see a way found for the National Government to spend as much money on solving the southern negro problem as it has been spending for six years past on the Philippine problem. In short, they would like to see the National Government recognize its responsibility for many of the physical and moral difficulties which beset civilization in the Southern States and come to the aid of all the civilizing forces in those States They know that efficient help could only be given through existing local agencies; and the only help they would wish the Governmtnt to give is help to meet the peculiar burdens those agencies now have to bear because of the expedient social separation between the two races which are to occupy together the fair southern country. It was in the supreme interest of the whole nation that the Southern States were impoverished forty years ago by a four years' blockade and the destruction of their whole industrial system. It is fair that the nation should help to rebuild southern prosperity in the very best way, namely, through education.

Finally, let us all remember that the task of making competent free men out of slaves is not the work of a day or a decade, but of many generations. How many Anglo-Saxon generations have gone to dust on the long road from serfdom to freedom! It is a task to be worked at by each successive generation with the eager energy of men who know that for them the night cometh in which no man can work, but with a patience like that of God, who lives and rules forever.

Mr. CARNEGIE. We all know what a man the founder of Hampton was, General Armstrong, who was not only great, inspired in himself, but who inspired all who became intimately associated with him; among these his able, untiring