He had the training that a coloured youth receives at
Hampton, which, indeed, the autobiography does explain. But the
reader does not get his intellectual pedigree, for Mr. Washington
himself, perhaps, does not as clearly understand it as another
man might. The truth is he had a training during the most
impressionable period of his life that was very extraordinary,
such a training as few men of his generation have had. To see its
full meaning one must start in the Hawaiian Islands half a
century or more ago.* There Samuel Armstrong, a youth of
missionary parents, earned enough money to pay his expenses at an
American college. Equipped with this small sum and the
earnestness that the undertaking implied, he came to Williams
College when Dr. Mark Hopkins was president. Williams College had
many good things for youth in that day, as it has in this, but
the greatest was the strong personality of its famous president.
Every student does not profit by a great teacher; but perhaps no
young man ever came under the influence of Dr. Hopkins, whose
whole nature was so ripe for profit by such an experience as
young Armstrong. He lived in the family of President Hopkins, and
thus had a training that was wholly out of the common; and this
training had much to do with the development of his own strong
character, whose originality and force we are only beginning to
appreciate.
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