No man can estimate the injury thus inflicted upon not only the student but the cause of education.

Even unto to-day there are colleges in localities in the South which run all year while the common school only runs from three to eight months.
Indeed, the multiplication of colleges and academies for the "higher education of colored youth" is one of the most striking phenomena of the times: as if theology and the classics were the things best suited to and most urgently needed by a class of persons unprepared in rudimentary education, and whose immediate aim must be that of the mechanic and the farmer--to whom the classics, theology and the sciences, in their extremely impecunious state, are unequivocable abstractions.

There will be those who will denounce me for taking this view of collegiate and professional preparation; but I maintain that any education is false which is unsuited to the condition and the prospects of the student.

To educate him for a lawyer when there are no clients, for medicine when the patients, although numerous, are too poor to give him a living income, to fill his head with Latin and Greek as a teacher when the people he is to teach are to be instructed in the _a b c's_--such education is a waste of time and a senseless expenditure of money.
I do not inveigh against higher education; I simply maintain that the sort of education the colored people of the South stand most in need of is _elementary and industrial_.

They should be instructed for the work to be done.