Probably the most effective argument in favor of negro education is the success of Hampton and Tuskegee, two endowed schools, practically kept up by Northern benefactors, which are the great exemplifiers of industrial education. They are successful, both in providing for large numbers of students--about 3,000 altogether--and in producing an effect upon the whole South. The number of graduates is but a few score a year, and many of them go into professions for which they were not directly prepared in these schools. But great numbers of men and women who have spent only a year or two in these institutions carry out into the community the great lesson of self-help; and hundreds of schools and thousands of individuals are moved by the example of these two famous schools and similar institutions scattered throughout the South. They preach a gospel of work; they hold up a standard of practicality; they are so successful as to draw upon themselves the anathemas of men like Thomas Dixon, Jr., who says: "Mr. Washington ... is training them _all_ to be masters of men, to be independent.... If there is one thing a Southern white man cannot endure it is an educated Negro." The question is imperative. With all the efforts at education, notwithstanding the great reduction in the percentage of illiteracy, the number of negro adult men and women in the South who are unable to read and write is actually greater than at any time since by emancipation they were brought within the possibilities of education. The actual task grows greater every day, and if the resources of the South are more than correspondingly increased, it is still a question how much of them will be devoted to this pressing need. Education will not do everything; it will not make chaste, honest, and respectable men and women out of wretched children left principally to their own instincts. Education is at best a palliative, but the situation is too serious to dispense even with palliatives. Perhaps the first necessity is to improve the character and the training of the negro teachers. Both in the rural and the city schools appointments are in many cases made by white school board men who have little knowledge and sometimes no interest in the fitness of their appointees. The colleges and industrial schools all have this problem in mind. State normal schools for Negroes in many of the Southern states try to meet this necessity, but a great many of the country teachers, some of them in the experience of the writer, are plainly unsuited for the task. Some of them are themselves ignorant, few have the background of character and intellectual interest which would enable them to transmit a moral uplift.