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8 The Golden Age (SUCCESSOR TO RELIGIOUS FORUM) Published Ebery Thursday by the Golden Hge Publishing Company (Inc.) OFFICES: LOWNDES 'BUILDING, ATLANTA, GA. Price: $2.00 a Year WILLIAM D. UPS HMW, .... Editor A. E. RAMSAUR, ... Associate Editor W. F. UPSHA W, - - - - Business Manager H. R. BERNARD, - . . Sec’y and Treas Entered at the Post Office in Atlanta, Ga., as second-class matter. To the Public: The advertising columns of The Golden Age will have an editorial conscience. No advertisement will be accepted which we believe would be hurtful to either the person or the purse of our readers. Two Educational Anniversaries. Spellman Seminary and Tuskegee Institute, two widely-known institutions for the practical training of negroes, have just celebrated respectively, the twenty-fifth anniversary of their founding. It was a remarkable coincidence that these two schools, the former in Georgia’s capital, and the latter in the suburbs of the cultured little town of Tuskegee, Alabama, should be launched under dif ferent auspices about the same time. Each begin ning humbly and wisely but soon attracting the at tention and patronage of consecrated wealth from the North has grown to national fame and wide spread usefulness. Twenty-five years ago Miss Giles and Miss Pack ard, two noble women from New England, began their work in the basement of Friendship Baptist Church, of which Rev. E. R. Carter, one of the worthiest and safest negro leaders, is pastor. These women, imbued with the honest conviction that the negroes so recently released from slavery, needed practical education under vital Christian in fluences, determined to lay their lives on the altar of this work. Many good people without unkind intention, looked on with suspicion. But these Christian women were wise in their work. They deported themselves in such away as to win the confidence, then the admiration, then the love, of the white people of Atlanta. The Home Mission Society, through the special benefactions of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, took vigorously hold of the work. With the increasing demand there have come in creasing gifts, and now Spellman Seminary, train ing hundreds of negro girls every year, in domestic science, as well as letters-fitting them specially for the life that is before them, is one of the best equipped institutions in all the South. It is no time for someone to quibble about the education of the negro and argue against its tendencies. Some kind of education will doubtless hurt the negro, but not the kind that Spellman Seminary is giv ing. Miss Packard, who labored side by side with Miss Giles for years, fell at last amid the noble eviden ces that she had not labored in vain, and in the spacious auditorium of Spellman Seminary, a fit ting memorial seeks to tell of her self-sacrificing work. Miss Giles, the consecrated President of Spell man, has done a work in bringing real Christianity, common sense and refinement to the negro women of Georgia and the South, whose saving influence eternity alone can reveal. About twenty-five of the trustees of Spellman Seminary have been in Atlanta this week attend ing the anniversary exercises. They are godly men and women, and we bid them God-speed in all their unselfish efforts. And thus humbly also began the work of Booker T. Washington, near Tuskegee. Hundreds of negro teachers started schools in different communities of the South twenty-five years ago and have never been heard from outside of their communities—and many of them are forgotten, save for an unworthy The Golden Age for April 12, 1906, memory of unworthy living. But Booker Wash ington is known today not only all over America, but well nigh all over the world. From the cross roads schoolhouse where he began in obscurity, he has moved out with more than a thousand students every year into an institution of marvelous equip ment and millions of endowment. Again we de clare it is no time for somebody to arise and re mark that many of the Tuskegee graduates have not made useful members of society. We grant that the proportion of unworthy ones is regret fully large; but hundreds of these negro men and women have gone out into the world as artisans, mechanics, teachers, and producers, who are now owning homes of their own, teaching economy and stability to their race, and making two grass blades grow where barely one was found before. There is but one answer: Booker T. Washington, as Mr. Carnegie said of him, has been a Moses un der God to lead his people out into a higher plane of useful citizenship. The white people around Tuskegee tell us that his influence for goood over his race in that section of the “black belt,” is wholesome and uplifting indeed. Dr. J. L. M. Curry, the great Southern Christian statesman, uttered a great truth when he declared “ignorance is no remedy for anything.” If there had been less of such one sided education as many people of the North brought to the negro imme diately after the war, and more of the kind which Tuskegee and Spellman are giving the present and future of the negro in the South would be brighter and more prophetic of the best possible solution of the problem of the races. Practical, Christian education for both races is the duty of the present and the hope of the future. In the Role of Avarice. To the unfettered soul, the devil perhaps appears in his most loathsome form when clad in the robes of avarice. A generous spirit is in sympathy with the spirit of God; a selfish spirit is in tune with the devil. Whatever else may be his faults and foibles, a man of generous deeds is always loved, for his soul has caught some bright beams of celestial splendor. Whatever else may be his grace, however pure his private life, the sordid man is cordially hated deep down in the souls of all his follow men. Natuarlly so, for he is a property of the devil, and his danger is palpable. (Some avaricious men have some excellent traits to their credit, but still they cannot be esteemed. In a certain Georgia city there lives a man whose word is as good as his bond, who is kind and fair spoken to everybody, generous and indulgent to his family—but to them only. He is a moral man, does not know the taste of liquor nor tobacco, has prob ably never used an oath; jn fact his private life is thoroughly wholesome. Starting life with no capi tal, he has amassed a fortune, and honestly. But he never has been known to do a public spirited act. His townspeople know that it were as fruitless to ask him to contribute to a charity or a benevolence, as to seek Ao’s of the proverbial thistle. In the town where he has lived for his more than fifty years, dispassionate men speaking calmly have been beard to say that when he died no one would care save his family. None would regret his pass ing. As living he is valueless to his community, his death would entail no loss. But there are examples of avarice beside which this one pales into a paragon of virtue. A few days ago a lady from Arkansas submitted to this publication some verses and sketches expressing the hope that we might pay her something for them if available. “I regret to say it,” she wrote, “but I have no other way now of getting the means to dress decently, or make a contribution to my church. I used to get along pretty well by sewing but my strength has failed. I have to drudge and toi 1 all day, year in and year out, with never a kind word from my husband. He never gives me any thing. I used to think it was because we were poor, but now he owns thousands of broad and fertile acres. If you can not use the articles do not re- turn them, do not write me anything, for it would only bring down upon my head his ridicule and abuse. ’ ’ In Atlanta there is a bookkeepeer who is paid a salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month. He owns several houses which bring him a good rental. He saves all his salary and rental income every month and buys more property with the money. He compels his wife to make the liv ing expenses for the family and her own money by peddling laces, medicines, or whatever merchandise she can. Recently one of their children fell ill. The mother plead for a physician. The father would not consent to call one until he wrung from his wife the promise that she would work harder and make the money to pay the bill. The child died. They owned no lot in the cemetery. Then the ghoul threatened to bury the little corpse in a pine coffin in the potter’s field, and consented to decent arrangements only when he had crushed from the heart-broken mother a promise that she would work still harder on the streets and earn the money to repay him the cost of the coffin, the funeral, and the cemetery lot. Verily, I know my Savior is the Son of God, for He is the opposite of these! Happy Childhood. On the car last evening were three children, the oldest a girl of about fourteen, the others being a boy and girl, aged about ten and eleven respect ively. An earnest argument wag in progress on some subject. As the car stopped to receive a pass enger the voice of the fourteen year old girl could be heard in positivee tones: “When it comes to comparison, there just isn’t any comparison. Ev erybody knows that Mendelssohn was nothing like as great an artist as Schubert.” This settled the question finally and closed the argument. That child knew—knew absolutely and was entirely un vexed of doubt. There you have in a word the chief beauty of childhood. There is no doubt or worry or hesitation about anything. Conclusions are reached without friction or delay and they are always the correct ones. Everything is just what it seems, and there is one, only one drawback to that happy time. We cannot realize our perfect joy until it passes. We often think of it now; our dreams go oftener backward than forward and most men and women would gladly return and tread those golden ways with childish feet again. To quote from Jas. A. Hall’s “Valley of Childhood”: “0 happy, silent valley * Your sky is ever blue; And from life’s barren hill-tops, We all look back to you.” The Fascination of Type. Phineas T. Barnum, who made some reputation during his life as a showman, said that the public wanted to be humbugged. M e would not presume to question Mr. Bar num’s opportunities to judge of human nature in this connection, but we cannot personally agree that his statement is literally true. There is nothing* that so pains us as to be humbugged—and all our friends whom we have interviewed unhesitatingly declare that they prefer that things come up to specifications, and they be spared the mortification of being easy marks. The most universal method of humbugging the public is through advertising. A showman could not induce the public to come into his show through personal statements that his tent contained certain marvels—he can have a picture of them made, and print glowing show-bills, and they do the trick. No doctor could, by merely talking, convince us that some one had an immediate cure for consumption—that cancer, asthma and catarrh could be cured while we wait, or that a bean-pole figure could be made over into a replica of Juno by the application of a pleasing and highly perfum ed ointment—but see these things in print, and we separate from our coin promptly—trusting implic itly. What does it? It’s the type. Put anything into print and it’s gospel truth. There is a fascE nation about type. It cannot be escaped.