They forgot, too, just as their successors are
forgetting, the rule of inequality:--that of the million black
youth, some were fitted to know and some to dig; that some
had the talent and capacity of university men, and some the
talent and capacity of blacksmiths; and that true training
meant neither that all should be college men nor all artisans,
but that the one should be made a missionary of culture to an
untaught people, and the other a free workman among serfs.
And to seek to make the blacksmith a scholar is almost as
silly as the more modern scheme of making the scholar a
blacksmith; almost, but not quite.
The function of the university is not simply to teach bread-
winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be
a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of
that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowl-
edge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civiliza-
tion. Such an institution the South of to-day sorely needs. She
has religion, earnest, bigoted:--religion that on both sides the
Veil often omits the sixth, seventh, and eighth command-
ments, but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones.
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