Immediately after the Civil War, in the halcyon days of reconstruction, the higher education was administered copiously to the Negro, in the honest belief that it was the catholicon for his ills; and universities for the Coloured man sprang up thick about us. Here, in New Orleans, there are at least three. A sadder and at the same time a more ludicrous sight we have never beheld than on the occasion of a call upon the President of one of these _soi-disant_ universities. We waited in the ante-room for the dismissal of his class in psychology. At last the bell tapped, and half a dozen Mulatto women, the whole class, emerged from the lecture-room of this distinguished scholar, whose name was not unknown in Europe. With a look of infinite despair, which not even his mistaken enthusiasm for humanity could quite chase away, the heavy-hearted lecturer followed and proceeded to conduct us through the building to his own residence. We passed through but one room where class exercises were in progress. An olive-coloured young man was at the board, trying to explain to a Mulatto woman, the only member of the class, the mysterious nature of a perpendicular. He appeared very earnest in his exposition, but unable to awaken any answering intelligence. To us, it seemed that the force of folly could no further go; and our commiseration for the highly cultured theologian, since released from his labours, who had so utterly forgotten the famous prohibition near the close of the Sermon on the Mount, was and remains even to this day painfully intense. We hear less nowadays of the saving efficacy of Greek, Latin, and the Calculus,[27] but all the more of the imperative necessity for industrial training--the idea which Mr. Washington has championed so vigorously and to which Mr. Carnegie has lent the sanction of his munificence. Undoubtedly this notion, if not far wiser, is at least far more practicable. While the higher culture at "coloured universities," in the vast majority of cases, merely spoils a plough-hand or house-maid, industrial training, like that given at Tuskegee, may very reasonably be expected to raise sensibly the productive efficiency of the Negro, and to elevate the general standard of his life through the formation of valuable habits of manual dexterity, of accuracy, of conscientiousness, and of thrift--not to mention occasional great gain in scientific equipment, or even some artistic awakening. One cannot deny, then, that Mr. Washington has undertaken a great and beneficent work for his race--one in which some measurable success may reasonably be hoped for.