population, there are probably here to-day fewer Negro artisans than there were in 1870? Here is a profound need, and for the schools a rare opportunity. Moreover, the school life of most children is short, not over five or six years. If the school possessed adequate facilities for giving industrial capacity, more parents would be willing and able to let their children remain in school seven and eight and nine years. The schools and the cultivated portion of this community cannot afford to give those who ask for bread a stone. We[9] must send the whole boy to school and not merely his head!

[9]

Not for a moment do I decry that important function of the schools, which I have called the development of wants. Human wants are social forces. Corn and cotton are grown to supply certain bodily wants; the fine arts are cultivated in response to certain æsthetic wants; philosophy and pure science are elaborated at the quiet insistence of certain intellectual wants; religion is preached to assuage certain spiritual wants. Every voluntary act is the hand-maid of some want. Now, it is the fundamental business of the schools to enlarge the range of the students’ interests and wants, to stir up a divine discontent. The saddest thing about the Negro peasant in his windowless cabin in Georgia, the saddest thing about the Negroes in the filthy shanties of Mobile, New York, and Washington, is not so much poverty, as slovenly unconcern. What all such people need—be they white or black, red or yellow—is the development of wants—wants for better things. A man of moderately developed wants will exert himself to get a steady job under healthful conditions, to get a comfortable house to live in—three or four sunny, pleasantly furnished rooms and, if possible a garden for vegetables and flowers—yes, he will exert himself to win a wife to make that house a home. Such wants (and they are, you will note, not impossibly spiritual) every school ought to tend to develop.

In short, the development of the wants of sober men and the giving of the skill to buy the means of satisfying those wants—these two things are vital to the work of the school. Let me be clearly understood; the school should of course develop the more spiritual wants, wants for the things that give literature and art and religion their values.[10] These spiritual things are the headwaters of the fullest and deepest and highest enjoyments of life. But these matters have long been emphasized in the traditions of school-men; moreover, when the flesh is weak, the spirit is not very strong. My wish just now is to emphasize the things that lie at the basis of race maintenance and progress.

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