of sacred memory, in the anti-slavery crusade, Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, of Washington, Pa., seeing the great need of education and practical training for the freed people of the South and anticipating a bequest made in his will, advanced to the American Missionary Association some twenty thousand dollars for the establishment of the school at Memphis.

PRINCIPAL A. J. STEELE.

The school building and a "Home" for the workers, made necessary by the needs of the work and the adverse feeling toward teachers of colored schools, were erected and the school was opened in October, 1871. From that time till now the American Missionary Association has had charge of this school.

It was the wish of Dr. Le Moyne that the work of the school should be prosecuted along the most practical lines, to meet the more pressing demands of an untrained race, and to this end he stipulated that the so-called "dead languages" should form no part of its course of study, and that it should be adapted to the relief of the most pressing wrongs and needs of the colored people in the struggle for life to which emancipation had brought them. His wishes have been respected and the school has remained distinctively an English school, with as great attention to industrial training as time and means would allow.

The growth of the school, in all that counts to strengthen and confirm its influence and usefulness, has been steady and uninterrupted from the beginning, with its attendance of 250 pupils of low grades, to the present year, with an enrollment of over 700, distributed through its twelve years of study and training, over 200 of whom are in the Normal Department fitting for the work of teaching.

LE MOYNE INSTITUTE AND MISSION HOME.

The first class of two was graduated in 1876; since that over two hundred young people have received the diploma of the school, most of whom are living useful, self-respecting lives in the many communities where they have found homes.

To meet the needs of this constant growth the buildings have been enlarged repeatedly and a separate building for manual training, woodworking, printing, etc., has been erected.

Probably the most apparent work accomplished by the school has been the training of teachers for the public schools, hundreds of whom have gone out from our training and are now doing good work in Tennessee and the adjoining States of Arkansas and Mississippi.

Under the direction of the same principal for all but the first two years of its existence, the school has become the centre of many lines of influence extending in many directions and affecting many interests among the people. A library of some three thousand volumes has been gathered and has proved of great value to the students and to the community. Nothing else so directly and surely acts to train to thoughtful and self-respecting lives as an acquaintance with the literature of the English language and with the personalities of the great minds who have produced it.

One of the cherished purposes of the school is to fit up a number of "traveling libraries," each of a score or so of volumes, carefully selected to place at the disposal, in routine order, of graduates of the school teaching in country communities.

The public school teachers (colored) of the county have for years held monthly meetings at Le Moyne Institute, and for the past year have received regular instruction in the teaching of vocal music from the director of music of the school.

GRADUATE TEACHERS, LE MOYNE INSTITUTE.

The Alumni Association is an active and influential organization which acts with the institution in many ways, carrying on a course of lectures each term by prominent men of the community and assisting materially by the contribution of money for its Industrial work. At the present time this association has in hand a fund of over $200, to be used in this way, while, at the same time, it is purchasing a new piano for use in the Music Department. Few of our schools have more loyal supporters among their graduates than Le Moyne. Coherence and co-operation in racial interests are quite lacking and much needed among the colored people, such co-operation as is best illustrated by the Texas movement, described by the Hon. R. L. Smith, of Oakland, Texas, in a recent issue of The Independent. Such work as has been done at Oakland is, in many places, quietly being set on foot, with varying degrees of success, by students and associations of students, who had their training in schools of the American Missionary Association. The immediate aim and end of all our work is the social betterment of the people, and in the end its efficiency will be measured according as it succeeds or fails in this respect.

The history of education in America, written largely during the past thirty years, has few features of wider interest or deeper meaning than the establishment and remarkable development of the "mission schools" among the colored people of the South since their emancipation. The spelling-book followed hard by the teachings of the Bible, constituted the course of instruction at the beginning; this simple beginning has developed into a great system of training and instruction that exemplifies the latest and best methods of education and of school administration known anywhere, from the kindergarten through the common school branches, with manual or industrial training, to the normal school and college. These ideas and methods have very generally been extended and adopted into the common public schools and the higher state institutions, mostly taught and managed by graduates of the mission schools.

CHILDREN'S CHILDREN, LE MOYNE INSTITUTE.

All this growth of educational institutions and facilities would have been impossible except that along with it and acting as the underlying cause of and reason for it, there has gone a corresponding development of individuals of the race and of the race collectively, for whose uplifting it has most providentially been brought into existence.

The illustration entitled "Children's Children," accompanying this article, shows a class of children whose grandparents, direct from slavery, began with awkward, faltering steps to tread the "hidden paths of knowledge," and whose parents in their turn were graduated from the Normal department of Le Moyne School.

These grandchildren, one of whom in May, 1900, received from the hands of the principal the same diploma that, more than twenty years before, had been handed her mother, stand a proof positive, that may be read by those who run, of individual and racial development, not to be gainsaid or doubted. They possess a mental horizon far wider and more luminous than that of their grandparents, direct from bondage, and they are responsive to influences and emotions to which both parents and grandparents were strangers.

These "children's children," and there are