At
this school I found the students, in most cases, had more money,
were better dressed, wore the latest style of all manner of
clothing, and in some cases were more brilliant mentally. At
Hampton it was a standing rule that, while the institution would
be responsible for securing some one to pay the tuition for the
students, the men and women themselves must provide for their own
board, books, clothing, and room wholly by work, or partly by
work and partly in cash. At the institution at which I now was, I
found that a large portion of the students by some means had
their personal expenses paid for them. At Hampton the student was
constantly making the effort through the industries to help
himself, and that very effort was of immense value in
character-building. The students at the other school seemed to be
less self-dependent. They seemed to give more attention to mere
outward appearances. In a word, they did not appear to me to be
beginning at the bottom, on a real, solid foundation, to the
extent that they were at Hampton. They knew more about Latin and
Greek when they left school, but they seemed to know less about
life and its conditions as they would meet it at their homes.
Having lived for a number of years in the midst of comfortable
surroundings, they were not as much inclined as the Hampton
students to go into the country districts of the South, where
there was little of comfort, to take up work for our people, and
they were more inclined to yield to the temptation to become
hotel waiters and Pullman-car porters as their life-work.
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