EDUCATION is the name which we give to that process of equipment and training which, in our day, society gives the individual to prepare him for fighting the battle of life. We do not confer it as a privilege, but it is given on behalf of society for society's own protection from the perils of ignorance and incompetence. It is a privilege to which ever member of society is entitled. For without some equipment of this sort the individual is but half a man, handicapped in the endeavor to make a living. Here in America, we subscribe to the dangerous doctrine that twelve million of the people should receive the minimum of education. And in order to reconcile ourselves to this doctrine, we deck it in the garments of wisdom. Because of the serf idea in American life, we say that the Negro shall have a serf's equipment and no more. It is the same idea that the aristocracy of Europe evolved when the workers demanded that their children should be trained better than they themselves had been. "Why", said the masters, "if we give your children schooling they will be educated out of their station in life. What should the son of a carpenter need to know of Euclid or Virgil? He should learn his father's vocation that he may be well equipped to serve in that station of life into which it has pleased God to call him. We need more plowmen than priests, more servants than savants." In our own land, when Negroes demand education, we say, "Why, surely, give them industrial education. Your race has a great opportunity—to make itself useful. It needs trained craftsmen and workers and, perhaps, a few parsons. Teach your sons and daughters to work. That is enough." And we dexterously select leaders for them who will administer the soothing syrup of this old idea with deftness and dispatch. The General Education Board which disburses millions of dollars annually in the South for education has, so far, given to forty-one Negro schools the sum of $464,015. Only in two instances has any money been given to a real college. Practically all of it went to the labor-caste schools. Why? Because the dark degradation of the Negro must be lightened by no ray of learning. That would never do. We need them as "hewers of wood and drawers of water." And in the meanwhile, this is what the richest country on earth offers to ruthlessly exploited people as a training for life: