But they also know, not less certainly, that the maximal results of such instrumentalities are not far away but are hemmed within a very finite circle. Care and culture soon do their best and attain at least practically their _ne plus ultra_. For any progressive improvement, whether in animal or in plant, the agriculturist knows that he must look to the seed. This he must select with the utmost skill and caution--if he would even maintain the level of excellence already reached, if he would not have the "stock" lapse back to an ancient inferior average. All this doctrine, which every one admits so instantly and unhesitatingly in its application to wheat, corn, and cotton; potatoes, apples, and oranges; grapes and melons; sheep, cattle, swine, and horses; bees, birds, and fishes--all holds with full force and with inconceivable significance when applied to men. Education is of exceeding importance. People that neglect it thereby doom themselves to hopeless subordination; they drop out of the race for the prizes of life; they surrender unconditionally to their rivals and commercial foes. Training and culture of the highest type are necessary to secure the realization of potentialities, to make the very best of the material offered at hand; necessary, not only now and here, but everywhere and all the time. Any neglect or indifference at this point must prove fatal. The husbandman dares not deprive his corn of a single "ploughing," or leave his herd one night unprotected from the wolf and the cold. But it is the sheerest folly to expect of education the impossible--to dream that it can affect the blood, or transmute racial qualities, or smooth down the inequalities between individuals of the same breed, much less between the breeds themselves. Why, if education could lift the Negro to the Caucasian level, to what, pray, in the meantime would it lift the Caucasian himself? We repeat, and the repetition cannot be made too emphatic, there is no hope whatever of any organic improvement, of any race betterment of the Negro, from any or from all extra-organic agencies of education or religion or civilization. Let us, then, educate the negro, to make him a more useful and productive, a law-abiding and happier member of the community; but let us not hope too much from this education, if we would not be bitterly disappointed.