It need hardly be emphasised that those who are favouring the cause of industrial education, as a means best calculated to raise the coloured race, are quite as earnest in their desire for negroes to advance to higher culture when exceptional capacity shows itself. In the nature of things, however, this higher culture can be extended only to a comparatively few individuals. Referring to those who are unable to push their way so far, and yet are aiming at becoming scholars, Mr Powell adds:-- "If they had the industrial education now given in some schools they might support themselves in the same communities where they teach, acquiring decent homes of their own, which would be a much-needed example and incentive to all about them. The lack of anything worthy to be called home is the most appalling obstacle to the elevation of the negro. If these higher schools should furnish this industrial training, as some of them are beginning to do, nine-tenths, or, in many cases, nineteen-twentieths, of the pupils who never finish even the grammar-school course might be put in the way of living for the rest of their lives like human beings instead of like beasts." The fact is, that the industrial training is not only becoming more widely recognised as being what the coloured people most urgently need, it tends largely to make the students more independent by placing them in a situation in which they can pay their own way instead of receiving outside aid. Then, while the negroes have splendid capacities for service, there is surely no other people who so greatly need to be made to realise the value and dignity of labour. As Mr Powell further says:-- "It was one of the greatest evils of slavery that manual labour was considered degrading. This was especially mischievous in its effects on the poor whites. The South is only slowly coming to believe that one who works for a living can be qualified for good society. In many of the industrial schools already established, students are beginning to take pride in their command of tools, in their well-planned and executed mechanical work, and in the thorough, clean tillage, the enlarged and varied products, and the improved stock and buildings of the farms attached to these schools.... The ability to plan or build a church, a schoolhouse, or a dwelling, or to carry on a farm as it should be carried on, gives a man's opinion about purely professional matters greater weight in all struggling communities. A teacher, minister or physician could hardly have, aside from his mental and moral qualities, a more effective passport to the confidence and respect of coloured people."