In many instances the tenants were not only unable to pay their debts, but were also unable to pay their rents. In a few cases the landlords had to provide, at their own expense, provisions for their tenants. This was simply another way of establishing soup-houses on the plantations. The idea of buying land was foreign to all of them, and there were not more than twenty acres of land owned by the colored people in this whole neighborhood. The churches and schools were practically closed, while crime and immorality were rampant. The carrying of men and women to the chain-gang was a frequent occurrence. Aside from all this, these people believed that the end of education was to free their children from manual labor rather than prepare them for more and better work. They were very much opposed to industrial education. When the school was started, many of the parents came to the school and forbade our "working" their children, stating as their objection that their children had been working all their lives, and they did not mean to send them to school to learn to work. Not only did they forbid our having their children work, but many took their children out of school rather than have them do so. A good deal of this opposition was kept up by illiterate preachers and incompetent teachers, here and there, who had not had any particular training for their profession. In fact, ninety-eight per cent of them had attended no school. We continued, however, to keep the "industrial plank" in our platform, and year after year some additional industry was added until we now have thirteen industries in constant operation. Agriculture is the foremost and basic industry of the institution. We do this because we are in a farming section and ninety-five per cent of the people in this section depend upon some form of agriculture for a livelihood. How changed are the conditions now as regards our work! From the little one-room log cabin, the school has grown so that it now owns 100 acres of land, 14 buildings, counting large and small, with property valued at $37,000. From three students, it has grown so that we now have a school with more than four hundred students annually in attendance, representing more than a dozen Alabama counties and seven States. It has also grown from one to twenty teachers and officers. Including the class that graduated last term, thirty-seven have finished the course. All are living but one. No charge of criminal wrong-doing has been brought against even one of them. One of the young women is married to the head teacher, another to the superintendent of industries, and seven other graduates are employed in responsible positions by the school. One of these has taken a special course at Harvard University, three have taken additional courses at Tuskegee, one is in charge of the woman's department of a large school in Mississippi, two have founded schools of their own, one at Tilden, Ala., the other at Greensboro, Ala.