not only of his own people, but also of the white man, who was glad to do business with him and thought nothing of it.

In my own town of Tuskeegee there is a colored merchant who, not excepting any other merchant, has the largest trade in that county in retail groceries, and in a recent conversation with him he said that for thirty-five years his customers had been among the best white families of the county. More than a dozen times have I met the man who owned this Negro in the days of slavery and he expressed himself as more than pleased that his former slave had attained the honor of being the most successful grocery dealer in the town of Tuskeegee.

You would be surprised, if you were to inquire into the facts, to know how the Negro has grown in this direction. In the Southern states there are one hundred and fifteen drug stores owned by Negroes. In Anniston, Alabama, there are two large drug stores owned by black people, and in one section a wholesale drug store owned and operated successfully by a black man. The Negro who to-day owns and operates that large wholesale drug store, selling drugs to the white as well as colored retail druggists, was a slave, I think, until he was twelve or fifteen years of age. It is interesting to know that more banks have been organized in the last three years in the state of Mississippi than ever before. There have been ten banks organized since Vardaman became governor of the state.

For the reasons I have mentioned, the Negro in the South has not only found a practically free field in the commercial world, but in the world of skilled labor. Such a field is not open to him in such a degree in any other part of the United States, or perhaps in the world, as is open in the South. All of this has had a tremendously strong bearing in developing the Negro's moral and Christian life.

In proportion to their numbers, I question whether so large a proportion of any other race are members of some Christian Church as is true of the American Negro. In many cases their practical ideas of Christianity are crude, and their daily practice of religion is far from satisfactory; still the foundation is laid, upon which can be builded a rational, practical and helpful Christian life.

Let me illustrate the value of the economic and industrial training of the Negro: If one chooses, let him try this plan which I have tried on a good many occasions. Go into any village or town, North or South, enter their Baptist and Methodist churches—for the most part they belong to the Baptist Church—and ask their pastors to point out to you the most reliable, progressive and leading colored man in the community, the man who is most given to putting his religious teachings into practice in his daily life, and in a majority of cases one will have pointed out to him a Negro who learned a trade or got some special economic training during the days of slavery,—in all probability an individual who has become the owner of a little piece of land, who lives in his own house.

Now what lessons for the work that is before us can you and I learn from what I have attempted to say? The lesson suggested in the elevation of the black race in America will apply with equal force, in my opinion, to the inculcating of moral and Christian principles into any race, regardless of color, that is in the same relative stage of civilization. Here let me add that in all my advocacy of the value of industrial training I have never done so because my people are black; I would advocate the same kind of training for any race that is on the same plane of civilization as our people are found on at the present time.

But as to the lesson which may prove of direct interest, so far as you are concerned. In the old days, the method of converting the heathen to Christianity was very largely abstract. The Bible was, in most cases, the only argument. In the conversion of the heathen to Christianity or in raising the standard of moral and Christian living for any people, I argue that in the use of the economic element and the teaching of the industries we should be guided by the same rules that are now used in the most advanced methods of ordinary school-teaching—that is, to begin with the known and gradually advance to the unknown; we should advance from the concrete to the abstract. In doing this, industrial education, it seems to me, furnishes a tremendously good opportunity.

Let me illustrate: Not long ago a missionary who was going into a foreign field very kindly asked of me advice as to how he should proceed to convert the people to Christianity. I asked him, first, upon what the people depended mostly for a living in the country where he was to labor; he replied that for the most part they were engaged in sheep raising. I said to him at once that if I were going into that country as a missionary, I should begin my efforts by teaching the people to raise more sheep and better sheep. If he could convince them that Christianity could raise more sheep and better sheep than paganism, he would at once get a hold upon their sympathy and confidence in a way he could not do by following more abstract methods of converting them.

The average man can discern more quickly the difference between good sheep and bad sheep, than he can the difference between Unitarianism and Trinitarianism.

If the Christian missionary can gradually teach the heathen how to build a better house than he has used, how to make better clothes, how to grow, prepare and secure better food for his daily meals, the missionary will have gone a long way, may I repeat, toward securing the confidence of the heathen and will have laid the foundation in this concrete manner for interesting the pagan in a higher moral life and in getting him to appreciate the difference between the heathen life and the Christian life. In teaching the child to read we use the objective method; in converting the heathen we should employ the same method—and this means the economic or industrial method.

Some six years ago a group of Tuskeegee graduates and former students went to Africa for the purpose of giving the natives in a certain territory of West Africa training in methods of raising American cotton. They did not go there primarily as missionaries, nor was their chief end the conversion of these pagans to Christianity. Naturally, they began their work by training the natives how to cultivate their land differently, how and when to plant the crop, and when to harvest it, and gradually taught them how to use a small hand gin in getting the cotton ready for market.

Largely through the leadership of this group of Tuskeegee students, there is shipped from this section of Africa to the Berlin market each year many bales of cotton. The natives have learned through the teaching of these men to grow more cotton and better cotton. They have learned to use their time, have learned that by working systematically and regularly they can increase their income and thus add to their independence and supply their wants. Not only this, but in order that these people might be fitted for continuous and regular service in the cotton field, their houses have been improved and the natives have been taught how to take better care of their bodies. In a word, during the years that these Tuskeegee people have been in the community they have improved the entire economic, industrial, and physical life of the people in this immediate territory.

The result is, as one of the men stated on his last visit to Tuskeegee, there is little difficulty now in getting the children of these people to attend