Diversities of American Life | Page 9

the South depends upon the cultivation and diffusion of the highest scholarship in all its historic consciousness and critical precision. This sort of scholarship, of widely apprehending intellectual activity, keeping step with modern ideas so far as they are historically grounded, is of the first importance. Everywhere indeed, in our industrial age,--in a society inclined to materialism, scholarship, pure and simple scholarship for its own sake, no less in Ohio than in Tennessee, is the thing to be insisted on. If I may refer to an institution, which used to be midway between the North and the South, and which I may speak of without suspicion of bias, an institution where the studies of metaphysics, the philosophy of history, the classics and pure science are as much insisted on as the study of applied sciences, the College of New Jersey at Princeton, the question in regard to a candidate for a professorship or instructorship, is not whether he was born North or South, whether he served in one army or another or in neither, whether he is a Democrat or a Republican or a Mugwump, what religious denomination he belongs to, but is he a scholar and has he a high character? There is no provincialism in scholarship.
We are not now considering the matter of the agreeableness of one society or another, whether life is on the whole pleasanter in certain conditions at the North or at the South, whether there is not a charm sometimes in isolation and even in provincialism. It is a fair question to ask, what effect upon individual lives and character is produced by an industrial and commercial spirit, and by one less restless and more domestic. But the South is now face to face with certain problems which relate her, inevitably, to the moving forces of the world. One of these is the development of her natural resources and the change and diversity of her industries. On the industrial side there is pressing need of institutions of technology, of schools of applied science, for the diffusion of technical information and skill in regard to mining and manufacturing, and also to agriculture, so that worn-out lands may be reclaimed and good lands be kept up to the highest point of production. Neither mines, forests, quarries, water-ways, nor textile fabrics can be handled to best advantage without scientific knowledge and skilled labor. The South is everywhere demanding these aids to her industrial development. But just in the proportion that she gets them, and because she has them, will be the need of higher education. The only safety against the influence of a rolling mill is a college, the only safety against the practical and materializing tendency of an industrial school is the increased study of whatever contributes to the higher and non- sordid life of the mind. The South would make a poor exchange for her former condition in any amount of industrial success without a corresponding development of the highest intellectual life.
But, besides the industrial problem, there is the race problem. It is the most serious in the conditions under which it is presented that ever in all history confronted a free people. Whichever way you regard it, it is the nearest insoluble. Under the Constitution it is wisely left to the action of the individual States. The heavy responsibility is with them. In the nature of things it is a matter of the deepest concern to the whole Republic, for the prosperity of every part is vital to the prosperity of the whole. In working it out you are entitled, from the outside, to the most impartial attempt to understand its real nature, to the utmost patience with the facts of human nature, to the most profound and most helpful sympathy. It is monstrous to me that the situation should be made on either side a political occasion for private ambition or for party ends.
I would speak of this subject with the utmost frankness if I knew what to say. It is not much of a confession to say that I do not. The more I study it the less I know, and those among you who give it the most anxious thought are the most perplexed, the subject has so many conflicting aspects. In the first place there is the evolution of an undeveloped race. Every race has a right to fair play in the world and to make the most of its capacities, and to the help of the more favored in the attempt. If the suggestion recently made of a wholesale migration to Mexico were carried out, the South would be relieved in many ways, though the labor problem would be a serious one for a long time, but the "elevation" would be lost sight of or relegated to a foreign