Such a student will come back with a minute report of the way in which the family that he has seen lives, what their earnings are, what they do well and what they do ill; and he will explain how they might live better.

He constructs a definite plan for the betterment of that particular family out of the resources that they have.

Such a student, if he be bright, will profit more by an experience like this than he could profit by all the books on sociology and economics that ever were written.

I talked with a boy at Tuskegee who had made such a study as this, and I could not keep from contrasting his knowledge and enthusiasm with what I heard in a class room at a Negro university in one of the Southern cities, which is conducted on the idea that a college course will save the soul.

Here the class was reciting a lesson from an abstruse text-book on economics, reciting it by rote, with so obvious a failure to assimilate it that the waste of labour was pitiful.
I asked Mr.Washington years ago what he regarded as the most important result of his work, and he replied: "I do not know which to put first, the effect of Tuskegee's work on the Negro, or the effect on the attitude of the white man to the Negro." The race divergence under the system of miseducation was fast getting wider.