The Nashville globe. [volume] (Nashville, Tenn.) 1906-193?, 1908-11-13

~ NASoO POOplC nave nOI UGOu
taught how to utilize their spare time.
Most of them can read and write. but
having nothing special to write. they
spend the time going to the stations
to see the train. The result is the
habit of idling grows with them,
and idleness breeds crime, and
criminals are burdensome to the
state, the county and the mu-
nicipality. An industrial and me-
chanical college, such as Tennessee
ought to have, would go a long way
toward reducing this class to a min
imum. Thousands of young men who
do nothing practically now would be
taught thrift and industry, and in
stead of a floating element the state
would have citizenship that would
add to its productiveness and thereby
lessen the burden per capita.
Prof. Henry S. Pritchett, discuss
ing the subject of industrial educa-
ton before the Eleventh Conference
for Fducation in the South, which
convened in Memphis, Tenn, April
last, had the following to say in re-
gard to the Indian and the Negro:
There are prehaps only two
classes of our citizenship who have
right to call on the general govern
ment to aid in their education. and
these are they who by the very ma
ture of their presence among us are
the wards of the government: the In
dians, whose condition is not wholly
of their own making, and the brother
in black, who came to our country not
entirely with his own consent.
Sensible men to-day, whether south
or north of Mason and Dixon's line,
recognize that that act of legislation
which placed the unlimited franchise
in the hands of the Negro, was one of
the greatest political blunders of
which any country has ever been
guilty. Perhaps there was only one
greater in all our own political his
tory, the blunder of secession. To
day we realize that the consequences
of reconstruction Legislation has i'm
posed upon the Southern States
burden not entirely of their own
making, burden which is national
rather than local or sectional 1t
would seem to me that for these two
groups of our population there may
be some ground for invoking the aid
of the national government; but l be-
lieve primarily that for amy great
State of the Union the road to prog
ress along industrial training lies
along the same path by which we
have travelled in the development of
our other educational Institutions 1t
lies in arousing the civic conscience,
the civic pride and the civic RESPONSE
bility of the State; and as fast as
that pride, that conscience, that wis
dom is evoked there will come in any
State, in any territory, such institu-
tions as look to the betterment, the
improvement and the happiness of its
citizens.
ut seems to me clear that the obli-
cation to provide these schools is 60
ing to be as real, as unanswerable, as
unavoidable as has been the obliga-
ton to provide colleges and high
schools and grammar schools; and
believe this to be true because it is
only by such schools that we shall be
able to train the individual citizen so
as to make him an effective unit in
our commonwealth. For national eff
icency it is going to be necessary
that men and women shall be not only
morally efficient, not only intellectu-
ally efficient, but they must be eco
nomically efficient A nation is eff
cient only as are the individual units
making up that efficiency, and if we
are TO be nation efficient in the tru-
99t sense, it will be by making every
citizen of our country a unit morally,
intellectually economically efficient
We shall succeed in doing that in
such proportion as we provide for
them schools wisely, honestly, sin
cerely conducted"
1t will be seen from the extract
quoted that not only the Negroes of
Tennessee are interested in this ques.
ton. but the whole country is
awakening to the pressing need of
training the hands as we'll as the
mind. They have learned that a
trained mind without a trained hand
is like a ship without rudder or
steam raised in a boiler without a
valve. And since it is acknowledged
that all people need this special
training, it is doubly so in the case of
people who are surrounded by the
peculiar conditions that confront the
youth of the Negroes of the United
States; and those of Tennessee are