[Illustration: Tuskegee in the making. Nothing delighted Mr. Washington more than to see his students doing the actual work of erecting the Tuskegee Institute buildings. A group of students raising the roof on one of the buildings.] And as soon as they were established in their new quarters he organized the "chopping bee" already described and cleared some of the land so that it could be used for crops. He did not clear and plant this land to give his students agricultural training. He did it for the purpose that all land was originally cleared and planted--to get food. He, of course, realized that the educational content of this work was great--greater than any possible textbook exercises in the classroom. He then and there began the long and difficult task of teaching his people that physical work, and particularly farm work, if rightly done was education, and that education was work. To secure the acceptance of this truth by a race only recently emancipated from over two hundred years of unrequited toil--a race that had always regarded freedom from the necessity for work as an indication of superiority--was not a hopeful task. To them education was the antithesis of work. It was the magic elixir which emancipated all those fortunate enough to drink of it from the necessity for work. He also began to emphasize at this time his familiar dictum that learning to do the common things of life in an uncommon way was an essential part of real education. Probably the reverse of this dictum, namely, learning to do the uncommon things of life in a common way--would have more nearly corresponded to the popular conception of education among most Negroes and many whites.