The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.5, page 47, Mar. 1899, U. of Illinois Press

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MARCH · 1899 he can go to Harvard and Yale and graduate arid still go into the South or elsewhere and do business just as a white man does. There is rto need why every colored man who graduates at college should go to teaching or preaching. If we do not through the instrumentality of the stronger brain in the race, lay hold of the business and industrial openings in the South during the next lo years these opportunities will pass beyond our recall. My present plan is to be in New York on the lath or lath and I shall see you. I am expecting a visit from Mr. Walter H. Page, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, this week. Yours truly, Booker T. Washington I am very glare indeed to see Mr. Baldwir~'s letter and I thank you for sending it. B.T.W. TLS Con. ~ BTW Papers DLC. ~ Henrys Thomas Buckle (~8o ~ -6~), author of History of Civilization in England (2 vole., 1857-6~). ~ BTW used both Fortune's quotation from Buckle and a speech by Walter Hines Page in an unsigned article in the Tuskegee Student, Mar. ~6, 1899. Page said: ''To my mind, it is money and labor wasted in what is called education, if men and women are not taught to do things. An education that does not teach a man to do something and do it well, is not an education, whether that thing be the building of a house or a steam engine, becoming a great scholar or whatever it may be. Now, if that is true in general, it is true of every white man, it is true of every colored man.'' The Tuskegee Student noted that the quotation from Buckle's History of Civilization had appeared in the New York Age earlier. Buckle said: ''Of all the results which are produced among a people by their climate, food and soil, the accumulation of wealth is the earliest and in marry respects the most important. For although the progress of knowledge accelerates the increase of wealth, it is nevertheless certain that, in the first formation of society, the wealth must accumulate before the knowledge can begin. As long as every man is engaged in collecting the materials necessary for his own subsistence, there will be neither leisure nor taste for higher pursuits; no science can possibly be created, and the utmost that can be effected will be an attempt to economize labor by the contrivance of such rude and imperfect instruments as even the most barbarous people are able to invent. ''In a state of society like this, the accumulation of wealth is the first great step that can be taken, because without wealth there can be no leisure, and without leisure there can be no knowledge.'' The Tuskegee Stud ent commented: ''No amount of misrepresentation, nor of sophistry, nor of rodomontade, will shake from their faith those who believe with all their might that the Negro, that every race, must have a firm, a secure footing, in the basic, industrial avocations, if prosperity is to be assured him and those who are to come after him.'' (Tuskegee Student, 8 [Mar. ~6, 1899], 2, 3.) 47