The first objection to negro education is that the race is incapable of any but elementary education and that all beyond is wasted effort. Has the Negro as a race an inferior intellectual quality, a disability to respond to opportunities? With all the effort to educate the race, and with due regard to the fact that the proportion who can read and write is rapidly rising, the Negroes are alarmingly ignorant, the most illiterate group in the whole United States; and therefore they need special attention. In addition, they are subjected to the smallest degree of home training, and enjoy the smallest touch with those concentrated forces of public opinion which force the community upward. Some of the Negroes seek intellectual life at home, for occasionally you see a family grouped about the fire with the father reading a book to them; but hardly any of the rural people and probably few of the townsmen own a shelf of books and magazines and newspapers. Their journalism is in general rather crude. A class of patent inside newspapers is carried on by the heads of one or the other negro order; and they contain good advice, news of the order, advertisements of patent hair dressings which "make harsh, stubborn, kinky, curly hair soft, pliant and glossy"; and descriptions of the experiments of surgeons in making black skin white by the use of X-rays. Some of these papers are well edited, and all of them have discovered the great secret of modern journalism, which is to put as many proper names as possible into the paper. One difficulty with the negro newspaper is that it cannot fill up entirely with colored news; and on general questions and the progress of the world the regular white newspapers, with their greater resources, are certain to be more readable. Still, few Negroes outside the cities read either weekly or daily papers regularly; and one of the necessities for raising the race is to cultivate the newspaper habit. To be sure, there is a type of highly successful white journalism that does not edify the white race. Yet even a bad newspaper cannot help telling people what is going on in the world. In spite of its freight of crime, such a paper carries people out of themselves, makes them feel a greater interest for mankind, brings in a throng of new impressions and experiences, helps to educate them.