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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 knowledge
of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.
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 commandments,
but substitutes a dozen supplementary ones. She has,
as Atlanta shows, growing thrift and love of toil; but she
lacks that broad knowledge of what the world knows and
knew of human living and doing, which she may apply to the
thousand problems of real life to-day confronting her. The
need of the South is knowledge and culture,--not in dainty
limited quantity, as before the war, but in broad busy abundance
in the world of work; and until she has this, not all the
Apples of Hesperides, be they golden and bejewelled, can
save her from the curse of the Boeotian lovers.
The Wings of Atalanta are the coming universities of the
South. They alone can bear the maiden past the temptation of
golden fruit. They will not guide her flying feet away from
the cotton and gold; for--ah, thoughtful Hippomenes!--do
not the apples lie in the very Way of Life? But they will
guide her over and beyond them, and leave her kneeling in
the Sanctuary of Truth and Freedom and broad Humanity,
virgin and undefiled. Sadly did the Old South err in human
education, despising the education of the masses, and nig-gardly
in the support of colleges. Her ancient university
foundations dwindled and withered under the foul breath of
slavery; and even since the war they have fought a failing
fight for life in the tainted air of social unrest and commercial
selfishness, stunted by the death of criticism, and starving for
lack of broadly cultured men. And if this is the white South's
need and danger, how much heavier the danger and need of
the freedmen's sons! how pressing here the need of broad
ideals and true culture, the conservation of soul from sordid
aims and petty passions! Let us build the Southern university--
William and Mary, Trinity, Georgia, Texas, Tulane, Vanderbilt,
and the others--fit to live; let us build, too, the Negro
universities:--Fisk, whose foundation was ever broad; Howard,
at the heart of the Nation; Atlanta at Atlanta, whose ideal
of scholarship has been held above the temptation of numbers.
Why not here, and perhaps elsewhere, plant deeply and for
all time centres of learning and living, colleges that yearly
would send into the life of the South a few white men and a
few black men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained
ability, joining their hands to other hands, and giving to this
squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace?
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