"It is this vision of 'Education for life' which Dr. Peabody brings out so clearly—both its meaning and its value. The oldest friends of Hampton have hardly understood it before, so well does he explain it, and so thoroughly does he show that its purpose is to make men and women. Artisans and skilled workmen come out of it, but its first purpose is to develop individuals and all its interests tend to this end. This explains its limitations also, and answers many complaints. The white teacher who recently left because there was 'no future' for her own career; the educator who complained of a system which continued to educate on general lines when some vocational diversion would be more profitable; those who support the objections of the 'Crisis' that Hampton is not a university—all these critics fail to understand the new philosophy of Hampton and its dominant human motive. It would be a great mistake if, as appears to be hinted here, any concessions should be made to the demand of these last critics, whose aims would destroy the whole idea of Hampton, and its value as a world experiment. The author of the book and distinguished student of social ethics so strongly brings out its claim to a new education, for a new world that (to repeat) the reader cannot fail to inquire if this is the solution of the future in our forthcoming new world.

"Dr. Peabody brings us to the beginning of the third era and pays a deserved tribute to the new principal. Rev. James E. Gregg, who enters on the task at a critical time. Just now, when the race question is acute both here and everywhere, and when the new democracy is demanding a new education, there could hardly be a greater opportunity for the man or the school.

This inadequate sketch of a most informing and inspiring book may well be closed with a few paragraphs which sum up the aims of Hampton Institute:

"'In short, the fundamental issue in all education for life is between a training to make things and a training to make character. Is a man to be taught carpentering primarily that a house shall be well built, or that in the building the man himself shall get intelligence, self-mastery and skill?'

"'The principle was definitely accepted that these shops and classes were maintained, not as sources of profit, but as factors in an education for life. Young men and women were not to be regarded as satisfactory products of Hampton Institute because each could do one thing and get good wages for doing it, but because each had been trained to apply mind and will to the single task, and had made it not only a way of living, but a way of life.'

"'Trade education as conceived gradually developed and finally realized at Hampton Institute is a development of the person through the trade, rather than a development of the trade through the person. The product is not primarily goods, but goodness; not so much profit as personality.... These students become delivered from the benumbing conditions of modern industry by the emancipating and humanizing effect of the Hampton scheme of industrial training, and those who are thus initiated in a large view of their small opportunities are likely to find their way, not only to those occupations, which are still open at the top, but to those resources of happiness which are discovered when work has become a vocation, and labor has contributed to life.'"



NOTES

In the introduction to Book II of Negro Folk-Songs the author, Mrs. Natalie Curtis Burlin, has some interesting paragraphs showing the connection of this music with certain origins in Africa. She says:

"That Negro folk-song is indeed an offshoot from an African root, nobody who has heard Africans sing or even beat the drum can deny. The American Negroes are sprung, of course, from many tribes; but whereas the native traffic in slaves and captives brought individuals from widely separated parts of the continent to the coasts and thus to the European slavers, the great mass of Negroes that filled the slave ships destined for America probably belonged—according to some authorities—to the big linguistic stock called Bantu, comprising some fifty million people south of the equator. The Zulu and Ndau tribes, whose songs I studied, are of this stock. Yet, as there are over a hundred million Negroes on the Dark Continent, whose different traits are probably represented in some form in this country, all statements as to musical derivations could be made with final authority only by one who had studied comprehensively the music of many different tribes in Africa. This much, however, one may most emphatically affirm: though the Negro, transplanted to other lands, absorbed much musically from a surrounding civilization, yet the characteristics which give to his music an interest worthy of particular study are precisely those which differentiate Negro songs from the songs of the neighboring white man; they are racial traits, and the black man brought them from the Dark Continent.

"The most obvious point of demarcation between Negro music and European is found, of course, in the rhythm. The simpler rhythms natural to the white man (I speak of folk-music, the people's song, not of the elaborate creations of trained musicians) are usually even and symmetrical. Throughout western Europe and in English and Latin countries, the accents fall as a rule on the stressed syllables of the spoken tongue and on the regular beats of the music. The opposite is the case in Negro songs: here the rhythms are uneven, jagged, and, at a first hearing, eccentric, for the accents fall most frequently on the short notes and on the naturally unstressed beats, producing what we call 'syncopation' of a very intricate and highly developed order. The peculiarity of this syncopation is best explained to the layman by drawing attention to the way in which the natural rhythms of the English language are distorted to fit the rhythm of Negro music: where the white man would sing, 'Go down Moses,' the Negro chants, 'Go down, Moses,' while a phrase like 'See my Mother,' becomes in the mouth of the colored singer 'See my Mother.' These identical accents are found in even the wordless vowel refrains of native African songs. Rhythmically the Negro folk-song has far more variety of accent than the European; it captivates the ear and the imagination with its exciting vitality and with its sense of alertness and movement. For this reason Negro rhythms and white man imitations of them popularized as 'rag-time' have spread far and wide and have conquered the world to-day. The black man has by nature a highly organized rhythmic sense. A totally uneducated Negro, dancing or playing the bones, is often a consummate artist in rhythm, performing with utter abandon and yet with flawless accuracy. My African informant, Kamba Simango, thought nothing of singing one rhythm, beating another with his hands and dancing a third—and all at once!

"Melodically as well as rhythmically, American Negro songs possess distinct characteristics. One of these is a very prevalent use of the pentatonic or five-tone scale, corresponding to the black keys of the piano. If one comes upon a group of colored men unconsciously humming or whistling at work, most often it is the five-tone scale that utters their musical thoughts. This scale—along with other scales—is heard in black Africa also, and in the music of many simple peoples in different parts of the world. Indeed, just as totally unrelated races at certain stages of culture seem to trace many of the same rudimentary symbols and designs on pottery and in textiles, so in music, the archaic simplicity of the five-tone scale would seem almost a basic human art-instinct. Yet the highly developed civilization and the carefully defined musical systems of China and other nations of the farthest East retain the pentatonic scale in wide use, the Chinese in their philosophical and mystical theories of music, linking the five-tones symbolically with the heavenly bodies. It is surprising how much variety can be achieved with those five tones. One of the most graceful melodies that I know in all music is the popular Chinese 'lily Song' which I recorded from a Chinese actor and which possesses the sheer beauty of outline and the firm delicacy of a Chinese drawing. Indeed, the melodic possibilities of the five-tone scale, containing a charm absolutely peculiar to that scale, instead of being limited, seem almost endless.

"American Negro music, is however, by no means restricted to this tonality, for we find a broad indulgence in the major and minor modes of modern art, and also there are many songs in which occur tones foreign to those scales most common of which is perhaps the minor, or flat, seventh. Then, too, there are songs framed in the scale with a sharp fourth; and we also find, though more rarely in Negro music, the augmented interval of three semitones. Those of us who have noted Arabic folk-songs are accustomed to associate this latter interval with Semitic music; occurring as it does in African music also it reminds us of the contact between the black population of Africa and the Semitic peoples in the white north of the continent whose caravan trade brought them into communication with the more savage interior, while their ships touched at ports along the coasts and even landed colonists on the Eastern shores, where Arab trade across the Red Sea must have existed since early Bible times. As the age-old slave traffic brought captives from African tribes out from the heart of black Africa to the north, we can readily see how, since the very dawn of history, Negro and Semitic cultures must have touched. One of the Bantu legends in my collection from Portuguese East Africa is probably of Semitic origin, and the song which it embodies seems also tinged with foreign color. Without doubt, Semitic tunes and musical intervals found their way to African ears, while, on the other side, African Negro drum-beats and syncopations must have influenced Berber, Moorish and thus perhaps even Spanish rhythms.

"Another characteristic of the Negro, musically, is a harmonic sense indicating musical intuition of a high order. This instinct for natural polyphony is made clear in the recording of the Negro songs in this collection, wherein I have noted the four-part harmony as sung extemporaneously by colored boys who had had no musical training whatever. Some of the most beautiful improvisational part-singing that I ever heard arose from the throats of utterly illiterate black laborers in a tobacco factory. One has but to attend a colored church, whether North or South, to hear men and women break naturally into alto, tenor or bass parts (and even subdivisions of these), to realize how instinctively the Negro musical mind thinks harmonies. I have heard players in colored bands perform one part on an instrument and sing another while all those around him were playing and singing still different parts. Yet it has been asserted by some people that the harmonic sense of the Negro is a product of white environment and that the black man owes his intuitive gift to the slave-holders who sang hymns, ballads and popular songs in his hearing! With all due allowance for white influence, which has been great, of course, the fact remains that in savage Africa, remote from European culture, many of the most primitive pagan songs are sung in parts with elaborate interludes on drums tuned to different pitches. Indeed the music of the Dark Continent is rich in polyphonic as well as rhythmic suggestions for the European. Perhaps the war may help to prick some of the vanity of the white race, which, looking down with self-assumed superiority upon other races, is quick to condemn delinquencies as native characteristics, and to ascribe to its own influences anything worthy; whereas the reverse is, alas, all too often the case. Certainly the art of Africa, of India, of the Orient and of North America owes to the Anglo-Saxon only corruption and commercialization. As for American Negro music, those songs that are most like the music of the white people—and they are not few—are the least interesting; they are sentimental, tame, and uneventful both in melody and rhythm. On the other hand, such melodies as 'Go down Moses,' 'Four and Twenty Eiders on Their Knees,' 'Run, Mary, Run,' these speak from the very soul of the black race and no white man could have conceived them. They have a dignity barbaric, aloof and wholly individual which lifts them cloud-high above any 'White' hymns that the Negro might have overheard. Austere as Egyptian bas-relief, simple as Congo sculpture, they are mighty melodies, and they are Negro."

* * * * *

D. Appleton and Company have published for Professor Ulrich B. Phillips of the University of Michigan a volume entitled American Negro Slavery.

Lincoln, the Politician, by T. Aaron Levy, and Latest Lights on Abraham Lincoln, and War Time Memories, works published by Badger and Revell respectively, are two important volumes throwing light on the Civil War.

Among the Washington University Studies has appeared a monograph by C. S. Boucher entitled The Secession and Cooperation Movements in South Carolina, 1848 to 1852.

* * * * *

[Transcriber's Notes:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other inconsistencies. The transcriber made the following changes to the text to correct obvious errors:

1. p. 20, "aquaintance" —> "acquaintance" 2. p. 43, "San Fancisco" —> "San Francisco" 3. p. 44, "legisalture" —> "legislature" 4. p. 49, Footnote #46, "Califronia" —> "California" 5. p. 51, "except Lawrence who is" —> "except Lawrence (who is" 6. p. 51, "Distrist" -> "District" 7. p. 52, "ten to eleven years," —> "ten to eleven years)," 8. p. 53, "San Bernardini" —> "San Bernardino" 9. p. 54, "Banjamin" —> "Benjamin" (twice) 10. p. 60, No footnote text for footnote #58. 11. p. 64, No footnote text for footnote #67. 12. p. 64, No footnote text for footnote #68. 13. p. 65, No footnote text for footnote #71. 14. p. 65, No footnote text for footnote #72. 15. p. 82, "fellings" —> "feelings" 16. p. 95, "famlies" —> "families" 17. p. 107, "instrumnts" —> "instruments" 18. p. 119, No footnote marker for footnote #187 in original text. 19. p. 125, No footnote marker for footnote #199 in original text. 20. p. 173, "cannoit" —> "cannot" 21. p. 186, "reesmblance" —> "resemblance" 22. p. 187, "doubt fear" —> "doubt, fear" 23. p. 194, "passsd" —> "passed" 24. p. 195, "decendants" —> "descendants" 25. p. 195, "neices" —> "nieces" 26. p. 208, "talley" —> "tally" 27. p. 210, "Sewanee Reivew" —> "Sewanee Review" 28. p. 222, No footnote marker for footnote #248 in original text. 29. p. 224, "opprobium" —> "opprobrium" 30. p. 225, "comsioner" —> "commissioner" 31. p. 229, "Negreos" —> "Negroes" 32. p. 254, "frofeit" —> "forfeit" 33. p. 264, "Jaunary" —> "January" 34. p. 281, "earthern" —> "earthen" 35. p. 352, No footnote marker for footnote #489 in original text. 36. p. 354, "agressive" —> "aggressive" 37. p. 364, "arest" —> "arrest" 38. p. 371, Footnote #518, "admited" —> "admitted" 39. p. 373, Footnote #521, "Univerity" —> "University" 40. p. 375, "poportions" —> "proportions" 41. p. 383, "and being generally relished," —> "(and being generally relished," 42. p. 384, "Adjourned to 10 Oclock)" —> "(Adjourned to 10 Oclock)" 43. p. 390, "overated" —> "overrated" 44. p. 391, "(It was moved by Mr. Rutlidge" —> "It was moved by Mr. Rutlidge" 45. p. 391, "(Ayes—6; noes))4.)" —> "(Ayes—6; noes—4.)" 46. p. 391, "Ayes—5; noes—5.)" —> "(Ayes—5; noes—5.)" 47. p. 407, "instituton" —> "institution" 48. p. 418, "our of this country" —> "out of this country" 49. p. 423, "gentlman" —> "gentleman" 50. p. 428, The migration "or importation' —> The migration or importation 51. p. 432, "obtaning" —> "obtaining" 52. p. 439, "administartor" —> "administrator" 53. p. 451, "comprehensvely" —> "comprehensively" 54. Various The footnotes have been re-numbered.

Also, many occurrences of mismatched single and double quotes remain as published.

End of Transcriber's Notes]