Darkwater

p toward perfection as they are trained. All human problems, then, center in the Immortal Child and his education is the problem of

er to London to meet Pan-Africa. We were there from Cape Colony and Liberia, from Haiti and the States, and from the Islands of the Sea. I remember the stiff, young officer who came with credentials from Menelik of Abyssinia;

hidden keys and he was quick with enthusiasm,-instinct with life. His bride of a year or more,-dark, too, in her whiter way,-was

ndon's endless rings of suburbs. I dimly recall through these years a room in cozy disorder, strewn with music-music on the floor and

soloists. He left his wife sitting beside me, and she was very silent as he went forward to lift the conductor's baton. It was one of the earliest renditions of "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast." We sat at rapt attention and when the last, weird music died, the great chorus and orchestra

a simple and uneventful career. His father was a black surgeon of Sierra Leone who came to L

dly workingman gave him a little violin. A musician glancing from his window saw a little dark boy playing marbles on the street with a tiny violin in one hand; he gave him lessons. He happened to gain entran

l round of a modern world-city, it more than gained in the almost tempestuous outpouring of his spiritual nature. Life to him was neither meat nor drink,-it was creative flame; ideas, plans, melodies glowed within him. To create, to do, to accomplish; to know the white glory of mighty midnights and the pale Amen of dawns was his day of days. Songs, pianoforte and violin pieces, trios and quintets for strings, incidental music, symphony, orchestral, and choral works rushed from his fingers. Nor were they laboriously contrived or light, thin thi

of his death held positions as Associate of the Royal College of Music, Professor in Trinity College and Crystal Palace, Conductor of the Handel Choral Society and the Rochester Choral Society, Principal of the Guildhall School of Music, where he had charge of t

ontinuously and carelessly to let it last its normal life. We may well talk of the waste of wood and water, of food and fire, but the real and unforgivable waste of modern civilization is the waste of ability an

ed in subtle, compelling, and more than promising profusion. He did not live to do the organized, constructive work in the full, calm power of noonday,-the reflecti

continually we see worthier men turning to the pettier, cheaper thing-the popular portrait, the sensational novel, the jingling song. The choice is not always between the least and the greatest, the high and the empty, but only too often it is between starvation and something. When, therefore, we see a man, working desperately to earn a

deeper hurt. He had, with us, that divine and African gift of laughter, that echo of a thousand centuries of suns. I mind me how once he told of the bishop, the well-groomed

me full-grown across the seas with an English imprint; but born here, it might never have been permitted to grow. We know in America how to discourage, choke, and murder ability when it so far forgets itself as to choose a d

and cry

sweetness of their voices, their inborn sense of music, their broken, half-articulate voices,-he leapt with new enthusiasm. From the fainter shadowings of his own life, he sensed instinctively the vaster tragedy of theirs. His soul yearned to give voice and being to this human thing. He early turned to the sorrow songs. He sat at the faltering feet of Paul Laurence Dunbar and he asked (as we sadly shook our heads) for some masterpiece of this world-tragedy that his soul could set to music. And then, so characteristically, he rushed back to England, composed a half-dozen exqu

ilogy one of the most universally-beloved works of modern English music. One critic calls Taylor's a name "which with that of Elgar represented the nation's most individual output" and calls his "Atonement" "perhaps the finest passion music of modern times." Another critic speaks of his originality: "Though surrounded by the influences that are at work in Europe today, he retained his indi

" the "staunch and loyal friend." And perhaps I cannot better end these hesitating words than with that tribute from one who called this m

his race, a mo

nds to beauty

h his lips the

ack, benumbed i

never have been educated as a musician,-he should have been trained, for his "place" in the world and to make him satisfied therewith. Thirdly, he should not have married t

never have been born, for he is a "problem." He should never be educated, for he cannot be educated.

king lead to the child,-to that vast immortality and the wide sweep of infinite possibility which th

es, it is better for him that a millstone were han

e, against color prejudice is to be won, it must be won, not in our day, but in the day of our children's children. Ours is the blood and dust of battle; theirs the rewards of victory. If, then, they are not there because we have not brought them into the world, we have been the guiltiest

imless rafts of children to the world, but as many as, with reasonable sacrifice, we can train to

shield, to indulge and pamper and coddle, as though in this dumb way to compensate. From this attitude comes the multitude of our spoiled, wayward, disappoi

t and let them learn as they may from brutal fact. Out of this may come strength, poise, self-dependence, and out of it, too, may come bewilderment, cringing deception, and self-distrust

very step of dawning intelligence, explanation-frank, free, guiding explanation-must come. The day will dawn when mother must explain gently but clearly why the little girls next door do not want to play w

t of ten to a good deal clearer understanding than you think and that the child

e and the shameful wrong of it, you have furnished it with a great life motive,-a power and impulse toward good which is the mightiest th

e strength of the motive work, and it becomes the life task of the parent to guide and to shape the ideal; to raise it from resentment and

For we know that as the world grows better there will be realized in ou

his: humanly speaking it was sheer accident that this boy developed his genius. We have a right to assume that hundreds and thousands of boys and girls today are missing the chance of developing u

ull development of the child, but that the world regards and always has regarded education first as a means of buttressing the established order of things rather than improving it. And this is the real reason why strife, war, and revolution have marked the onward march of humanity instead of reason and sou

manhood and womanhood, clear reason, individual talent and genius and the spirit of service and sacrifice, and not simply a frantic effort to avoid change in present institutions; that industry is for man and not man for industry and that w

fine ideal of an equal maximum of freedom for every human soul combined with that minimum of slavery for each soul which the inexorable physical facts of the world impose-rather than complete freedom for some and complete slavery for others; and, again, is not the equality toward which the world moves an equality of honor in the assigned human task itself rather than equal facility in doing different tasks? Human equality is not lack of difference, nor do the infinite human differences argue relative superiority and inferiority. And, again,

ucation is greatly simplified: we aim to develop human souls; to make all intelligent; to discover special talents and genius. With this course of training begin

s to be the only way to make the world listen to reason. Consider our race problem in the South: the South has invested in Negro ignorance; some Northerners proposed limited education, not, they explained, to better the Negro, but merely to make the investment more profitable to the present beneficiaries. They thus gained wide Southern support for schools like Hampton and Tuskegee. But could this program be expected long to satisfy colored folk? And

does its daily work. These things cannot be separated: we cannot teach pure knowledge apart from actual facts, or separate truth f

and-maiden of production. America is conceived of as existing for the sake of its mines, fields and factories, and not those factories, fields and mines as existin

f common men and conserve genius for the common weal? Without wider, deeper intelligence among the masses Democracy cannot accomplish its greater ends. Without a more careful conservation of human ability and talent the world cannot secure the services which its greater needs call for. Yet today who goes to colleg

xcusable inequality of wealth nor on physical differences of race.

adest, highest way. They must fill the colleges with the talented and fill the fields

y an intensification of the problem of educating all children? Look at our plight in the Unite

ing that illiteracy is a crude and extreme test of ignorance, we may assume that there are in the United States ten million people over ten years of age who a

for of the Americans six to fourteen years of age there were 3,125,392 who were not in school a single day during that year. If we take the eleven million youths fifteen to twenty years of age for whom vocational training is particularly adapted,

attend school during the school year 1909-10. Of the native white children of native parents ten to fourteen years of age nearly a tent

to the colored children, the

y during 1909-10; for the other sixty per cent the school term in the majority of cases was probably less than five months. Of the Negro children ten to fourteen years of age 18.9 per cen

that lies about our infancy is but the ideals come true which every generation of children is capable of bringing; but we, selfish in our own ignorance and incapacity, are making of education a series of miserable compromises: How ignor

f Kaiserism which called for the expenditure of more than 332 thousand millions of dollars was not a whit more pressing than the menace of ignorance, and that no nation tomorr

ss life of children's children. Seeking counsels of our own souls' perfection, we have despised and rejected the possible increasing perfection of unending generations. Or if we are thrown

ain up workers with honor and consciences and brains. Have we degraded service with menials? Abolish the mean spirit and implant sacrifice. Do we despise women? Train them as workers and thinkers and not as playthings, lest future generations ape our worst mistake. Do we despise darker races? Teach the childr

the ignorant mass, panting to know, revolts, we dole them gingerly enough knowledge to pacify them temporarily. If, as in the Great War, we discover soldiers too ignorant to use our machines of murder and destruction, we train them-to use machines of murder and destruction. If mounting wealth calls for intelligent workmen, we rush tumultu

o the cost-all the wealth of the world, save that necessary for sheer decent existence and for the mainten

me of powerful and selfish interests made this path through hell the only visible way to heaven. We did it. We had to do it, and we are glad the

ly want wa

t a cost no whit less and if necessary a hundr

education cost

recting ability in the land, even if we have to strip the railroads and meat trust. We should dot city and country with the most efficient, sanitary, and beautiful s

is a

affor

we teach Latin, Greek, and mathematics to the 'masses'?" If they are worth teaching to anybody, the masses need them mo

education of a million children? The real answer is-kill nine hundred and ninety thousand of them quickly and not gradually, and make thoroughly-trained men and women of the other ten th

nce and personal favor and yet we attempt to base the right to education on this foundation. The result is grotesque! We bury genius; we send it to jail; we ridicule and mock it, while we send mediocrity and idiocy to college, gilded and crowned. For three hundred years we have denied black

nd inescapable, Education, and that not for me or for you but for the Immortal Child. And that child is of all races and all colors. All children are the children of all and not of individua

hty D

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Pulitzer, Oct