There is a saying to the effect that if you see a large building in Germany you may know that it is a military barracks, in England it is a factory, in Denmark a school. I never saw such healthy, happy, robust school children as I did in Denmark, and, with all respect to Danish agriculture, I am convinced that the best crop that Denmark raises is its children. While other countries have sought to increase the national wealth and welfare by developing the material resources, Denmark, having neither coal, iron, oil, nor any other mineral, nothing but the land, has increased not only the national wealth but the national comfort and happiness by improving her people. While other nations have begun the work of education and, I was going to say, civilization, at the top, Denmark has begun at the bottom. In doing this Denmark has demonstrated that it pays to educate the man farthest down. FOOTNOTE: [5] "What I Learned About Education in Denmark," chapter XI. "My Larger Education," Doubleday, Page & Company, 1911. CHAPTER XVIII RECONSTRUCTING THE LIFE OF THE LABOURER IN LONDON At the end of my long journey across Europe I returned to London. I had seen, during my visit to Denmark, some results of the reorganization of country life. In this chapter I want to tell something of what I saw and learned in London of the efforts to reconstruct the life of the Underman in the more complex conditions of a great city. In the course of my travels through various parts of the United States, in the effort to arouse public interest in the work we are trying to do for the Negro at Tuskegee, I have frequently met persons who have inquired of me, with some anxiety, as to what, in my opinion, could be done for the city Negroes, especially that class which is entering in considerable numbers every year into the life of the larger cities in the Northern and Southern States. The people who asked this question assumed, apparently because the great majority of the Negro population lives on the plantations and in the small towns of the South, that the work of a school like the Tuskegee Institute, which is located in the centre of a large Negro farming population, must be confined to the rural Negro and the South. In reply to these inquiries I have sometimes tried to point out that a good many of the problems of the city have their sources in the country and that, perhaps, the best way to better the situation of the city Negro is to improve the condition of the masses of the race in the country. To do this, I explained, would be to attack the evil at its root, since if country life were made more attractive, the flow of population to the city would largely cease.