One secret of Booker Washington's leadership was that he always had his ear to the ground and his feet on the ground. Some one has said that "a practical idealist is a man who keeps his feet on the ground even though his head is in the clouds." Booker Washington was that kind of an idealist. He kept in constant and intimate touch with the masses of his people, particularly with those on the soil. Like the giant in the fable who doubled his strength every time he touched the ground, Booker Washington seemed to renew his strength every time he came in contact with the plain people of his race, particularly the farmers. No matter how pressed and driven by multifarious affairs, he could always find time for a rambling talk, apparently quite at random, with an old, uneducated, ante-bellum black farmer. Sometimes he would halt the entire business of a national convention in order to hear the comment of some simple but shrewd old character. He had a profound respect for the wisdom of simple people who lived at close grips with the realities of life. At the 1914 meeting of the National Negro Business League at Muskogee, Okla., a Mr. Jake ----, who had started as an ignorant orphan boy, delighted Mr. Washington's heart when he testified: "When I first started out I lived in a chicken house, 12 x 14 feet; now I own a ten-room residence, comfortably furnished, and in a settlement where we have a good school, a good church, and plenty of amusement, including ten children." After the laughter and applause had subsided Mr. Washington asked: "Do you think there is the same kind of an opening out here in Oklahoma for other and younger men of our race to do as you have done and to succeed equally as well?" To which Mr. Jake replied: "... I think I have succeeded with little or no education, and it stands to reason that some of the graduates from these industrial and agricultural schools ought to be able to do better than I have done." Which was, of course, just the answer Mr. Washington hoped he would make. Mr. Washington's instinct for keeping close to the plain people was perhaps best illustrated by his tours through the far Southern States for the improvement of the living conditions of his people, the tours to which allusion has several times been made. His insistence upon cleanliness, neatness, and paint became so well known that his approach to a community frequently caused frantic cleaning up of yards, mending of gates, and painting of houses. These sudden converts to paint sometimes found out from which side the great man was to approach their house and painted only that side and the front. [Illustration: Mr. Washington in characteristic pose addressing an audience.] [Illustration: Mr. Washington silhouetted against the crowd upon one of his educational tours.] [Illustration: Mr. Washington in typical pose speaking to an audience at Shreveport, La.]