focussed upon the task of Negro education the patriotic, religious, and philanthropic sentiment of the American people.
It might be said that the University was reared on these three pillars. The fundamental aim of the founders was to build up an enlightened leadership within the race. To do this it was necessary to refute derogatory dogmas hoary with age and tradition. An enslaved people had not been permitted to taste of the tree of knowledge, which is the tree of good and evil. This coveted tree has been zealously and jealously guarded by the flaming sword of prejudice, kept keen and bright by avarice and cupidity. It was said that the Negro could not be educated. The missionaries refuted the charge by educating him. Phyllis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker and Frederick Douglass were looked upon as freaks of nature. Experience soon showed that Negro youth fresh from the yoke of slavery could master the white man's knowledge, so-called, in the same length of time and with comparable degree of thoroughness, as the most favored youth of the most favored race.
Nowhere in all history has education so fully vindicated its claim as the process of unlocking and releasing the higher powers and faculties of human nature. The circumstances amid which this work had its inception read like the swiftly moving scenes of a mighty drama. In track of the victorious army of the North there followed a valiant band of heroes and heroines to do battle in a worthier cause. Theirs was no carnal warfare; it was the battle against the powers of darkness entrenched in the ignorance and poverty of an imbruted race. A worthier or more heroic band has never furnished theme for sage or bard. They were sustained by an unbounded zeal amounting almost to fanaticism, and were drunk with the new wine of human enthusiasm. They gave the highest proof that the nineteenth century furnished, that the religion of the Christ was not a dead formula of barren abstract moralism, but a living vital power. The pen of the beneficiary never tires portraying the virtues of the benefactor. Their monument is builded in the hearts and hopes of a race struggling upward from ignorance to enlightenment, from incompetence to effi-
