For three hundred years the Negro by his marvelous assimilative power and by striking individual emanations has been constantly manifesting the higher possibilities of his nature, until now whoever assumes to doubt his susceptibility for better things needs himself to be pitied for his incapacity to grasp the truth. The same Carlyle who regards the Negro as an “amiable blockhead,” and amenable only to the white man’s “beneficent whip,” also declares: “That one man should die ignorant who had capacity for knowledge, this I call a tragedy, were it to happen forty times in a minute.” When it is known that the Negro has capacity for knowledge and virtue there can be no further justification for shutting him out from the higher cravings of his nature. IS THE HIGHER EDUCATION OF THE NEGRO WORTH WHILE AS A PRACTICAL PHILANTHROPY? The education of the Negro is not of itself a thing apart, but is an integral factor of the general pedagogic equation. Race psychology has not yet been formulated. No reputable authority has pointed out just wherein the two races differ in any evident mental feature. The mind of the Negro is of the same nature as that of the white man and needs the same nurture. The general poverty of the Negro, however, and his inability to formulate and direct his own scheme of culture, render the question not so much one of abstract pedagogics, as of practical philanthropy. The philanthropist is supremely indifferent as to whether an individual, white or black, should study Kant or Quaternious, except, in so far as the resulting development reacts beneficially upon the common welfare. Does the higher education of the few capable Negroes possess sufficient advantage to the race at large to justify its continuance by a wise and discriminating philanthropy? The great missionary societies, representing the philanthropic arms of the Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist denominations after forty years of arduous, earnest endeavor and the expenditure of many millions of dollars in this field, answer this question emphatically in the affirmative. An ounce of opinion from such sources should be worth a ton of speculation from those who reach their conclusions by a process of “pure reasoning.” THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION TO A BACKWARD RACE.