general average, but is the one certain method to find the most capable. This is the kind of natural selection that democracy is to use, and it is the only law of the survival of the fittest that can be permanently tolerated by a humane society. The purpose to promote universal education is one of the most encouraging features of our democracy.

Higher education has been carried on longer in the State, and the colleges are better equipped for their work than the mass of public schools. (Under colleges I include all the higher institutions of education). With the industrial revival and the new educational impulse of the present, I believe our colleges have a rare opportunity to do for this generation a formative and lasting service. I am not sure, however, that the colleges are fully living up to their opportunities. I shall call attention to three particulars in which reform appears to me to be most urgently needed.

A glaring defect of American civilization is our national mania for bigness and blind faith in numbers. The true college is the home of excellence, and one would expect that the college would be the last place to be affected by the vicious doctrine of numbers or the fatal confusion between bigness and greatness. And yet higher education is threatened by just this danger; and from this source, I think, come some of our most serious evils. At least ten years ago every college in the State should have taken the chances of reduced numbers and refused admission to all students who had not completed a high school course. I should not speak of this now, if I felt sure that there had been made an end to this evil. It has been reformed indifferently, no doubt; it should be reformed altogether. It is just as injurious to individuals, just as destructive to schools below, just as subversive of discipline and fatal to any thoroughgoing system, to admit to college, students who have not completed the high school course, as it would be to admit to the high school, students who had not finished the grammar school course. Without the perfect articulation of high school and college we can never have a system thoroughly organized from top to bottom, and without such a system we can never have genuine educational progress. It seems to me the only reason why this reform cannot be had at once is the unwise desire on the part of colleges for ever increasing numbers.

Insufficient control in the colleges, and especially the excessive desire for numbers, have led to the wild exploitation of athletics, from which the whole country is suffering. I believe heartily in athletics, when properly carried on; but every one of us, who has considered the question at all, knows that there are athletic evils in North Carolina colleges that cry aloud for reform. And athletic abuses are closely bound up with the lack of intellectual and moral discipline and the general looseness of undergraduate life, concerning which complaints are coming from all quarters today. In many American colleges these evils are partly due to the too rapid growth of the colleges and their inability at once to adjust themselves to changing conditions. It sometimes looks to me as if we might be in danger here of deliberately adopting some of the evils that curse other sections and from which circumstances have kept us free.

The craze for bigness brings another evil in its wake, and that is, the resulting tendency for colleges to be concerned primarily about their immediate interests-more students, bigger buildings, increased appropriations, larger gifts-rather than give themselves whole-heartedly to the service of great causes. This kind of striving must benumb the noblest aspirations and make impossible the truest success of colleges; for colleges, like men, are subject to the immutable law of greatness through service.

In addition to schools that fit our youth for the life and work upon which they are to enter and also prepare for college such as can continue their education, and in addition to colleges that send out their graduates trained and matured in body, mind, and character, we need a small number of professional schools with standards for entrance and for graduation as high as are maintained in the most progressive sections of the country. To no professional school, whether law, medicine, divinity, teaching, technology, should the entrance be easier than to the A. B. course of the best colleges. For the so-called learned professions the admission requirement in the stronger institutions should be not less than two years of college work. The time has come in civilized countries when no man should be allowed to enter one of these professions without adequate and thorough preparation. The creation of proper standards for all the professions is a direct product of a rational system of education.

Then, too, some such organized system will be necessary before plans for popular education can be carried on successfully or on a sufficiently large scale; and the perfecting of such a system is one of our first duties. But no one, I suppose, thinks that any organization is of much value except in so far as it furnishes the means by which competent men and women may work effectively. Unquestionably the teacher's best opportunity to build enduringly is in constructive teaching. The one sure way to promote the causes that I have spoken for tonight and others equally important that, doubtless, have suggested themselves to you while I have been talking, is to build progressive ideas into the mind and character of the youth of the State. Those who have command of this source of power must not mistake themselves or be mistaken by others for innocent pedagogues and school keepers. Affording, as it does, opportunity for the exercise of first-rate ability and for useful service, life for us, we ought to feel, is not a weak and passive thing, but a great and noble calling.

A New Suggestion on the Race Problem

BY ERNEST G. Dodge

Whatever may be the final status of the American negro and whatever the ultimate measure of his now latent capacities, we, his teachers in a school of which he is a compulsory pupil, are treating him ill if we confine him perforce to a partial self-development, denying him in any great field of human activity the right to grow through experience and exercise. And not only is such a teacher unjust, but he is selfishly shortsighted, for life is richer for all of us when environed by people who "can" than when by those who "cannot."

Yet this is precisely the policy now dominant. Americans of African blood are enjoying fair opportunities for exploiting whatever pedagogical, theological, or medical abilities may be theirs, a more limited but yet considerable chance to develop industrial ability, but no opportunity at all worth mentioning for training and awakening the freeman's power of self-government. And yet self-government is an older attribute of man than medicine or pedagogy, older even in a sense than industry, and ought to have an early place in the rational education of any backward people.

To deny that the school of experience in which political capacity is developed (the school which has created the difference between Englishmen and Russians or between the Swiss and the French peasantries) is indeed closed to our black fellow citizens would be superficial. For, although a limited number, South as well as North, place their votes periodically in a ballot box, real training in self-government is almost as completely absent as if they left their ballots to rot in a hollow log in the woods! Self-government implies the exercise of a real power, the actual settlement of a disagreement with one's peers, and a train of good or evil consequences of which the voter may feel himself the responsible cause and from which he may learn wisdom. It implies also the possibility that the voter may himself be called upon to meet the grave responsibilities of office holding and to enjoy the personal development of character which naturally comes with it. All these things today the ballot brings to the dominant race and fails to bring

to the negro, compelled as he is to march tagtail in the political procession, in it but not of it, even where the suffrage itself is not restricted.

Of course there are difficulties to consider before we attempt to give the negro the same genuine discipline in the bearing of political responsibilities which is serving to educate all other American manhood; for no trying over again of the unhappy experiments of reconstruction times would be tolerated by the men of today. But, if the negro, at the South especially, cannot have an harmonious and fruitful share in the white man's ballot box, why has it never occurred to the minds of constitution makers to give the negro a ballot box of his own? Such an arrangement would be strictly in harmony with the policy of the South on other matters touching the black race. The South has said by law that there shall be no intermarriage; the negro must not seek a place in the white man's family circle. But the right of a negro to have a family life of his own is universally recognized, and the purer and cleaner this life can be made, the better for the whole community. The South has also said that in public schools there shall be no co-education of the races, and the right of the white child to a school where he is exempt from association with those socially repugnant to him shall be safeguarded; but the equal right of the black child to have, in his separate way, the privileges of public schooling is recognized by the laws of every Southern State. Many States have gone still farther and have forbidden the black man to ride in the white man's car, but this does not mean that he is forbidden to patronize the railroad; a separate car or compartment is provided for him. It is only in the matter of government that a different course has been pursued, the dominant race deciding, when it became evident that an open ballot box for all was at present inimical to peace and prosperity, that a freedman and his children must practically be denied all the benefits of political life.

The objection will perhaps be raised that while separate families, separate schools and churches, and separate coaches are entirely practicable, there is and can be but one government in the community. But let us see how far this objection holds. There is already a small beginning of separate politics, growing out of the school district. The two races vote separately for school trustees, selecting them from their own number, and some