inexperienced labourers about us, we found that we could, with advantage to all, rent large tracts of land, sub-rent to others, and in this way pay no rent ourselves, as these sub-renters did that for us. We could in this way also escape paying taxes, insurance, and other expenses that naturally follow. It does not appear that “the Tuskegee influence” involves any economic idealism, or any doubt as to the legitimacy of capitalistic exploitation. Principal Washington’s message, by his own admission, or, rather, insistence, might not unfairly be called “The Gospel of the Toothbrush.” |Washingtonian Optimism.| Again and again he uses this unpretending appliance as a symbol of the clean-living self-respect which he has made an ideal for his race. His policy, as he puts it in a remarkable passage, is to teach the negro to “want more wants.” It is the man with scarcely 55any wants who can satisfy them by working one day a week and loafing the other six. The man who wants many things “to make a happy fireside clime for weans and wife,” is the man who can be trusted to work steadily for six days out of the seven. This undeniable and (from the employer’s point of view) most salutary truth ought to put to silence the dwindling minority of Southerners who still object to the very idea and principle of negro education. |Washingtonian Optimism.| | | 55 But suppose the majority of the race converted either into men of independent substance or satisfactory labourers for hire, will the problem be thereby solved? Principal Washington has no doubt on the subject. In the introduction to “Tuskegee and its People,” he proclaims his optimism in no uncertain voice: The immeasurable advancement of the negro, manifested in character, courage, and cash ... is “confirmation strong as proofs of Holy Writ” that the gospel of industry, as exemplified by Tuskegee and its helpers, has exerted a leavening influence upon civilization wherever it has been brought within the reach of those who are struggling
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