Page:Women of distinction.djvu/387

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WOMEN OF DISTINCTION.
311

deep and strong, upon which the youths of to-day and of succeeding generations must place the superstructure. Necessity is the mother of invention, and applying the implied principle to the urgent necessities of our case "in equity," these teachers, instinctively, as it were, early adopted the tenets of the New Education as the most rational if not a royal road to knowledge.

The industrial idea in education has received their hearty co-operation, because in it they recognize the safest method of fitting youth for practical, productive citizenship; and from the kindergarten to the university, from the normal to the industrial school, as supervisors and as specialists, they have shown an aptitude for all-round honest work bounded only by the limitations of time and space. Often, out of slender salaries, they have laid the foundation of the school library, the kindergarten, or the industrial school. In fact, they seem to have considered no sacrifice of time or money too great which would in any way benefit the ' race. Thus, spending their lives for one single and unselfish end, they have put into the work their fullest and highest personality: and upon this more depends in the development of character, which is all that counts in the long run, than upon the use of the text-book.

Within the last decade we have had a flood of talk (small and otherwise) of articles and would-be legislation upon the so-called "Negro Problem," and its presumable solution; meanwhile our worthy teachers, many of whom are women, have patiently toiled on, in season and out of season, solving a knotty point here,