T.M. CAMPBELL, District Demonstration Agent, Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.] Thus did Booker Washington in the very year of his death, with the aid of the National Government, launch the last of his many means for helping the people whose welfare lay ever nearest his heart--the Negro farmers. These Extension Schools are literally "going out 'into the by-ways and hedges'" carrying to those who most need it Booker Washington's gospel of better farming. One of the great secrets of Mr. Washington's success was his unerring instinct for putting first things first. In nothing that he did was this trait better illustrated than in the unceasing emphasis which he placed upon the fundamental importance of agriculture. He never forgot that over 80 per cent. of his people drew their living directly from the soil. He never ceased to impress upon the business and professional men of his race that their success was dependent upon the success of the farmers; and upon the farmers that unless they succeeded the business and professional men could not succeed. In short, he made Tuskegee first and foremost an agricultural school because the Negro race is first and foremost an agricultural race. CHAPTER EIGHT BOOKER WASHINGTON AND THE NEGRO BUSINESS MAN In 1900 Booker Washington founded the National Negro Business League. He was president of this league from its foundation until his death. During the winter of 1900, after reviewing the situation at length with his friend T. Thomas Fortune, the Nestor of Negro journalism, and at that time the dominant influence in the New York _Age_, who was spending the winter at Tuskegee, with Mr. Scott and others of his friends, he came to the conclusion that the time had come to bring the business men and women of his race together in a great national organization, with local branches throughout the country. He decided that such an organization might be a powerful agency in creating the race consciousness and race pride for which he was ever striving. All the then-existing organizations, other than the sick and death benefit societies and the purely social organizations, had as their main purpose the assertion of the civil and political rights of the Negro. There was no organization calculated to focus the attention of the Negroes on what they were doing and could do for themselves in distinction from what was being done for them and to them. All the existing associations laid their chief emphasis upon the rights of the Negro rather than his duties. Mr. Washington held that without in any degree sacrificing their just demands for civil and political rights a more wholesome and constructive attitude could be developed by stressing the duties and the opportunities of the race. He believed it would be helpful to emphasize in an organized way what they had done and could do in the way of business achievement in spite of race prejudice rather than what they had not done and could not do because of racial discrimination.