BY LYMAN ABBOTT

A

T the close of the Civil War General S. C. Armstrong called on General O. O. Howard, head of the Freedmen's Bureau, and asked for an appointment for field service in the cause of the freedmen. He was the son of missionary parents in Hawaii, a graduate of Williams College, and on graduating had entered the Army, had received a baptism of fire at Gettysburg, and as colonel of a Negro regiment had acquired a familiar acquaintance with the Negro's temperament and character, and had earned promotion by his nota

Service in the Southern field. Gen

eral Howard put him in charge of a camp near Hampton, Virginia, an appointment which gave him control as agent of the Freedmen's Bureau over ten counties in Virginia and as Superintendent of Schools over the educational work in a large, loosely defined area embracing those ten counties. His description of his charge is quoted here from the biography of General Armstrong by his daughter, Edith Armstrong Talbot, page 142:

Colored squatters by thousands and General Lee's disbanded soldiers returning to their families came to

gether in my district on hundreds of "abandoned" farms which the Government had seized and allowed the freedmen to occupy. There was irritation, but both classes were ready to do the fair thing. It was about a two years' task to settle matters by making terms with the landowners, who employed many laborers on their restored homes. Swarms went back to the "old plantations" on passes, with thirty days' rations.

From the first General Armstrong saw clearly what not all of his contemporaries saw, that it was not enough to transfer the New England schoolhouse into the Southern States. From the first he had an almost unique vision of the unique need of the hour, and to the realization of that vision he and his successor, Dr. Frissell, gave their lives with single-hearted and untiring devotion. Their object I state here in a sentence from memory as Dr. Frissell once stated it to me. "The object," he said, though I am not quoting his words, "is to give the Negro boys and girls what the State gives them by the public school. The public school gives the education; the family provides the support for the pupil while he is studying. Hampton gives the education to the pupil; and it provides productive work which enables the pupil to feed and clothe himself." The pupils were paid for the work, not in cash, but in credit on the books of the school.

The school was opened in 1868 with fifteen pupils; on April 26 it had thirty pupils doing manual work in the morning and studying in the afternoon and evening. In 1918 I visited the school. It then had 140 buildings, 1,100 acres of land, 1,802 pupils, including those who attended the summer school, 2,098 graduates, besides 7,500 who had gone out from Hampton after having taken a partial course. With the exception of the church, capable of seating about fifteen hundred, and the Robert C. Ogden Auditorium, seating about twenty-five hundred, and possibly two or three cottages, all the buildings have been erected by the students themselves and all the farm work and all the household work of the school, including that of an inn upon the grounds, is done by the pupils.

What has been called, I think without exaggeration, the most efficient and capable industrial school in the United States, if not in the world, is primarily due to an extraordinary corps of coworkers, dominated by the same spirit and guided and inspired by two leaders of singularly different temperament, but inspired by the same spiritual ambition -General S. C. Armstrong and Dr. H. B. Frissell. If life is a campaign, then Armstrong may be compared to General Sheridan and Frissell to General

Thomas; if life is a garden, then Armstrong selected the site, plowed the ground, sowed the seed and planted the seedlings, and Frissell weeded, pruned, trained the growing plant, and harvested the crop; if life is a school, then Armstrong gave life to the pupils, Frissell discovered unconscious life in the pupils and drew it from them. General Armstrong was a pioneer, Frissell a teacher; Armstrong a creator, Frissell an organizer. I wish I had space to essay a snap-shot of them both, but I must confine myself here to the one selected to be the subject of this sketch.

I do not find in his daughter's biog raphy any description of General Armstrong's appearance. The faded shadowpicture in my memory is that of a young man, somewhat under six feet, of slim build but broad shoulders, with no superfluous flesh, erect in pose, with keen eyes that looked not at you but into you, and an electric energy at once physical and moral.

I say young man, for he had up to the last the charm of youth. To him every day was a new beginning. In every day was the freshness of interest which belongs to youth. He would never have passed the dead line of fifty, not if he had lived to be a hundred. He lived in the present for the future. I never heard him talk of the past, would hardly have known that he had been a general in our Civil War except for the soldier's title which fitted him so perfectly that he could not have laid it off if he had tried. I was surprised when I began the preparation of this article to learn that he was only four years my junior. I had always thought of him as a much younger man. Years, infirmity, failing

COLORED STUDENT PLASTERERS AT HAMPTON AT WORK ON A BUILDING "With the exception of the church and the Robert C. Armstrong Auditorium, and possibly two or three cottages, all the buildings have been erected by the students themselves and all the farm work and all the household work is done by the pupils"

health, did nothing to abate his unquenchable humor. One day after paralysis had laid him aside from work and his physician had prescribed for him a walk of a few hundred yards as his only exercise, he was taking the prescription with his intimate friend, Robert C. Ogden. They were talking of the "Evening Post," and Mr. Ogden asked

DR. H. B. FRISSELL, GENERAL ARMSTRONG'S SUCCESSOR, MAKING AN ADDRESS, WITH TWO HAMPTON STUDENTS ON THE PLATFORM

"General Armstrong was a pioneer, Frissell a teacher; Armstrong a creator, Frissell an organizer"

General Armstrong what he thought of its editor, Mr. Godkin. "I think," said General Armstrong, "that he would begin the Commandments with 'I am the Lord thy Godkin, thou shalt have no other Godkins before me.'"

He was an electric battery, and in his writing, his conversation, his speeches he scintillated. He was unconsciously epigrammatic. Spontaneous epigrams, always kindly, though often keen, made him an intensely interesting conversationalist. When you talked with him, you naturally said only enough to start him talking or to keep him going. From his daughter's biography I select by chance a few of these spontaneous epigrams:

"Laughter makes sport of work."

In a speech to his students: "Spend your life in doing what you can do well. If a man can black boots better than anything else, what had he better do? Black boots."

After a visit to some of the missionary schools in the South, in answer to the question, "What was your impression?" "One sweetly solemn thought comes to me o'er and o'er."

From letters: "Human life is too weak to be an incessant flight toward the Sun of Righteousness. Wings will sometimes be folded because they are wings." "God's kings and priests must drudge in seedy clothes before they can wear the purple." "To get at truth, divide a hyperbole by any number greater than two. . . . In animated narratives divide facts by ten."

Such spontaneous epigrams as these are both revealers of character and inspirers to life. A "Table Talk" of General Armstrong on the plan of the

"Table Talk" of Coleridge and that of Luther would be a classic.

With this freshness of interest in life was combined the courage of youth, but not the rashness. Rashness leaps before it looks; courage looks before it leaps; timidity does not leap at all. The wise man in asking, What shall I do? takes counsel of courage; in asking, How shall I do it? takes counsel of caution. It is because General Armstrong was both inspired by courage and guided by caution that he won the confidence of men who had no ambition to be pioneers. He wanted for his school a building which would cost seventy-five thousand dollars; he had on hand two thousand dollars. He used the two thousand dollars to dig the cellar and lay foundations, and so had a "mute appeal" to speak to the visitors from the North who came down to lay the cornerstone, and it talked to good purpose. The students learned brickmaking by making the brick and bricklaying by building the walls, and at the end he had made both a building and the builders. The vision appealed to the idealists, the method to practical men-and he got the money.

I felt that by the triple task that he had set himself he was killing himself. Το overcome race prejudice in the South, to educate for useful service Negroes at Hampton, and to create in the North an understanding of the problem and at the same time the means to carry the work on was too much for any one man to undertake. I joined with other friends in urging him to secure a permanent endowment for Hampton, and so relieve himself from the Northern campaigning. "Yes," he replied in substance, "I would like an endowment for Hampton; we need it. But I do not wish to avoid the begging campaign. To educate the North is as important for the Nation as to educate the South and the Negro." At the same time that the old Abolition Society was formally by resolution disbanding because nothing remained for it to do General Armstrong was organizing his campaign to carry forward the work which the Abolition Society had only begun. "It failed to see," said he, "that everything remained. Their work was just beginning when slavery was abol

ished." He was right. No historian can adequately estimate the value of the service to our National development rendered by the campaigns carried on in the North by General Armstrong, Dr. Frissell, Booker T. Washington, and the Christian churches. To these campaigns we owe the consciousness that the race problem is a National problem, and with that consciousness a better mutual understanding between the North and the South and between the white and the colored races.

With this youthful interest, this cautious courage, this ever-reinvigorated energy, was coupled a spirit of humility which I have not often found in men who do things. He had self-confidence, but was singularly free from self-conceit. I had written in what was then the "Christian Union" an article about Hampton, not then known and honored as it is to-day, and received from him the following characteristic letter of appreciation:

Parker House

Boston, December 18, 1884.

Dear Dr. Abbott: Thanks for your kind article in the last Xian Union on Hampton.

It is very cordial and earnest and will do good. It is not easy to live up to where you place me. The true prayer for a man in a responsible position is

Lord, help me to not make an ass of myself. I often pray this fervently. . . .

Yours sincerely,

S. C. ARMSTRONG.

I have no doubt that this was true. With all his seeming abandon he walked "circumspectly." Yet his abandon was not a seeming. One of his teachers tells me the following incident illustrating his habitual self-forgetfulness. To one of the Hampton boys was assigned the care of the General's house and waiting on him at his meals, for the General ate with the rest of the teachers in a room in the students' hall. As this teacher was passing out from dinner the General beckoned to her for some consulta tion and was immediately absorbed in the business in hand. Presently, his eyes fixed on the teacher and his mind on their topic, he took up the mustard pot at his side and, without turning his head, reached it out toward the waiter.

The boy took it, for a moment was puzzled, then smiled, put down the mustard pot, took up the General's teacup and brought it back refilled, and the General took it and went on with his meal and his conversation, quite oblivious of the little comedy in which he had taken a part.

He did not live in a "fool's paradise." "Mere optimism," he said, "is stupid; sanctified common sense is the force that counts." But neither did he live in a fool's purgatory. "It remains to make the best of things. Those who are hopeless disarm themselves and may as well go to the rear; men and women of faith, optimists, to the front." The cynic scoffs at those who will not face facts; but there is no man who so persistently refuses to face facts as the cynic. General Armstrong saw the evil in men, but also saw the good, and instinctively, and without knowing it, gave life and power to the good. There is no work which seems to me so discouraging as "raising money"-the need seems so imperative, the public so apathetic. General Armstrong apparently believed that if you know how to strike the rock in the desert you can always get water. "Begging trips," he called them, and he rejoiced to escape from them to the more congenial companionship of the school at Hampton, but his habitual attitude toward the apathetic North was one of cheer. "I never cease to wonder," he wrote in one of his reports, "at the patience and kindness of those who daily listen to appeals from here [Hampton] and some other quarters, the wear and tear of which can be hardly less than of those who solicit aid from these overtaxed givers."

He carried the same spirit into his campaign appeals for teachers to give themselves. The difficulty of his job appealed to him, and he believed that it would equally appeal to others. Life was to him what a game is to the chess player-the more difficult the problem, the more interesting it is. Thus his appeals were what Christ called a fan; they separated the wheat from the chaff, discouraged the timid and self-distrustful, inspired and attracted the courageous and self-denying. Professor Peabody in his story of Hampton quotes the following summons from General Armstrong to Miss Helen W. Ludlow, which

he rightly calls "one of the classic passages of Hampton literature."

Hampton, September 27, 1872. Dear Miss Ludlow:

Five millions of ex-slaves appeal to you. Will you come? Please telegraph if you can.

There's work here and brave souls are needed. If you care to sail into a good hearty battle where there's no scratching and pin sticking but great guns and heavy shot only used, come here. If you like to lend a hand where a good cause is shorthanded, come here.

We are growing rapidly; there is an inundation of students and we need more force. We want you as teacher. "Shall we whose souls are lighted?" etc. Please sing three verses before you decide, and then dip your pen in the rays of the morning light and say to this call, like the gallant old Col. Newcome, "Adsum." Sincerely yours,

S. C. ARMSTRONG.

Miss Ludlow responded to the bugle call "as though called into action," and was in the school from 1872 until 1910, some years after the General's death.

My impression is that General Armstrong was a Congregationalist; but he did not belong to the Congregational denomination; he did not belong even to Hampton Institute. He belonged to God and to God's world. So far as I know, he never talked about his spiritual experience. I find in his biography two very significant sentences. One: "I would rather minister than be a minister." The other: "True worship is a gentle, sensitive, shrinking emotion that steals softly in hearts in quiet moments, often in response to some beautiful scene; sometimes it comes to us from the faithful true ones near us."

Two favorite religious books of his are said to have been Thomas à Kempis's "Imitation of Christ," the most archaic and ecclesiastical of devotional litera

ture, and "Amiel's Journal," the most modern and least ecclesiastical.

After his death a memorandum was found among his papers from which I quote three paragraphs:

Few men have had the chance that I have had. I never gave up or sacrificed anything in my life-have been, seemingly, guided in everything.

Prayer is the greatest thing in the world. It keeps us near to Godmy own prayer has been most weak, wavering, inconstant, yet has been the best thing I have ever done. I think this is universal truth-what comfort is there in any but the broadest truth?

I am most anxious to get a glimpse at the next world. How will it seem? Perfectly fair and perfectly natural, no doubt. We ought not to fear death. It is friendly.

To this glimpse of his inner life, the source of his charm and his power, no friend would wish to add anything.

W

HEN Professor Grandgent coined the adjective osteocephalic, he did much to remove the sting from "bone-head;" for, no matter what we may say, there is a lot in a name. I know a teacher who pays his students a compliment (as they think) when he puts them into a teleost section of his course-far removed from the elasmobranchs-and if "solid ivory" is not "complete bone" I should like to know what is. Perhaps the students confuse τέλεος with τῆλε — if they think of the matter at all-and vaguely imagine they have gone far from the osteocephalic end of the class; perchance they are afraid that if they looked up the word in the dictionary their classmates would accuse them of being hypselometopic. Or altifrontal. (If the superciliousness of the Roman highbrows has ruined a word, we must make a new one. And we have observed that most men receive a polysyllabic adjective of unknown meaning as a compliment. A philosopher could prove that this shows an innate kindliness-optimism-or conceit in man; but most philosophers are inclined to hypselometopy themselves.)

There is, I am sorry to say, a good Ideal of alticiliousness in the college town which I inhabit, but it is chiefly confined to the townsfolk. "Tis comforting to imagine that the students are, in general, too busy with their work (and play) to think of hypselometopy, which, like sentimentality, exists in and for itself. "The real motive of the sentimental giving of alms," writes President Neilson in "The Essentials of Poetry," "is not the good of the beggar but the giver's flush of satisfaction from the picture of himself as Benevolence relieving Misery." Akin to the "emotional

luxury" of the sentimentalist is the pride of the highbrow; no one would be hypselometopic if it were not for his neighbors. The sentimentalist cultivates emotion for the sake of the thrill, as Mr. Neilson puts it; and he inevitably develops into a cynic. The altifrontal, who has also been called a "culturine," is not primarily interested in gaining culture for his own sake, but that he may enjoy the thrill of impressing his neighbor.

These reflections were inspired by a recent theatrical performance in our town-a comedy, put on by amateurs, for the delectation of themselves and their neighbors. We have had what is known in the vernacular as "highbrow stuff"-that is, the fare served by Little Theaters all over the country, not for human nature's daily food, but for the pampered appetites of the hypselometopics; but this time the club chose something different. Not a farce exactly, but a good, broad comedy, healthy and laughter-bringing; it had some clever lines, too, some of which passed over our heads, but we came away pleased on the whole, and the applause left no doubt of our enjoyment. (Already there have been two requests for other performances elsewhere.) It was none of your exotic, bizarre, altifrontal plays, and the audience of friends and neighbors was pleasantly surprised.

But not all. A small group in the club, suffering from the peculiar form of hypselometopy sometimes found in small cities, lamented aloud, scorning the rest of us, who had (for once) found enjoyment at one of the amateurs' productions; they said that that kind of thing was all very well once in a while, but now that the groundlings had been

amused (or words to that effect) the club should go back to high art.

Poor things! They have just discovered Shaw, and take him seriously. One might judge, from the way they talk, that the less action a play has, the more dramatic it is. They are so intent on elevating the stage that I fear they will soon have us back (or up) to the Attic Theater. One sign of hypselometopy is the desire to elevate.

I remember a meeting, years ago, addressed by a dramatic poet (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say a poetic dramatist) who pleaded for a poetic drama on the ground, as far as I could make out, that he could write little else, and the public ought to be educated up to his plays. There seemed to be little room for discussion after the talk; but the chairman tried to provoke some (as chairmen will), and called on various members of the small group which made up the audience to "say a few words." Among them, he summoned the late Professor Wendell, who, obviously, had nothing to say and did not want to speak; but, being called upon, he rose, and after a word or two (during which we felt an Idea being born) he burst out: "Some people spell Drama with a big D, and pronounce it God." Could there be a better exposition of the hypselometopic attitude?

I don't know why it is that hypselometopy fastens chiefly on the drama. Perhaps that is the form which the present attack takes, because just now the theater is strongly intrenched in the public esteem. I suppose other forms of art are subject to attack-music, for instance, and painting; and I know there are altifrontals glibly repeating that Archibald Marshall is a modern Trollope, knowing nothing of Barchester