Under Douglass's leadership the movement had a new goal. The learning of trades was no longer to be subsidiary to conventional education. Just the reverse was true. Moreover, it was not to be entrusted to individuals operating on a small scale; it was to be a public effort of larger scope. The aim was to make the education of Negroes so articulate with their needs as to improve their economic condition. Seeing that despite the successful endeavors of many freedmen to acquire higher education that the race was still kept in penury, Douglass believed that by reconstructing their educational policy the friends of the race could teach the colored people to help themselves. Pecuniary embarrassment, he thought, was the cause of all evil to the blacks, "for poverty kept them ignorant and their lack of enlightenment kept them degraded." The deliverance from these evils, he contended, could be effected not by such a fancied or artificial elevation as the mere diffusion of information by institutions beyond the immediate needs of the poor. The awful plight of the Negroes, as he saw it, resulted directly from not having the opportunity to learn trades, and from "narrowing their limits to earn a livelihood." Douglass deplored the fact that even menial employments were rapidly passing away from the colored people. Under the caption of "Learn Trades or Starve," he tried to drive home the truth that if the free people of color did not soon heed his advice, foreigners then immigrating in large numbers would elbow them from all lucrative positions. In his own words, "every day begins with the lesson and ends with the lesson that colored men must find new employments, new modes of usefulness to society, or that they must decay under the pressing wants to which their condition is bringing them."[1] [Footnote 1: Douglass, _The Life and Times of_, p. 248.] Douglass believed in higher education and looked forward to that stage in the development of the Negroes when high schools and colleges could contribute to their progress. He knew, however, that it was foolish to think that persons accustomed to the rougher and harder modes of living could in a single leap from their low condition reach that of professional men. The attainment of such positions, he thought, was contingent upon laying a foundation in things material by passing "through the intermediate gradations of agriculture and the mechanic arts."[1] He was sure that the higher institutions then open to the colored people would be adequate to the task of providing for them all the professional men they then needed, and that the facilities for higher education so far as the schools and colleges in the free States were concerned would increase quite in proportion to the future needs of the race. [Footnote 1: _Ibid._, p. 249.]