He told J.W. to rummage through the one bookshelf in the study which held his small but usable collection of books and pamphlets on the Negro, and see what he might find.  And, as always, they talked.

“I can tell by that preacher at Saint Marks,” said J.W., “how I had the wrong end of the argument that night we came from Hightower’s address.  A man with a big job like his has to be a pretty big man, and he needs all the education he can get.”

“There’s a principle in that, J.W.,” suggested Mr. Drury; “see if this seems a reasonable way to state it:  In dealing with any people, the more needy they are, the better equipped and trained their leaders should be.”

“Yes, sir, it sounds reasonable enough,” J.W. admitted.  “And yet I never thought of it until now.  But you said something the other night that I don’t see yet.”

“That may be no fault of yours, my boy,” said the minister, with a laugh.  “What was it?”

“Why, you said men like Hightower are inclined to overlook the work of the church, and that it was the church’s own fault; something about raising new questions when you settle old ones.”

“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Drury, “I remember.  Maybe saying it’s the church’s own fault is not just the way to put it.  Say instead that you can’t educate children, nor yet races that are developing, and expect them to turn out exactly according to your notions of the future.  Because, when their minds are growing they are developing, not according to something in you, but according to something in them.  So every teacher, and I suppose every parent, has moments of wondering how it ever happens that young people learn so much that is not taught them.  And it’s the same way with races.”

“You mean,” inquired J.W., “that Hightower is like that?”

“I mean,” Pastor Drury replied, “that everybody is like that.  If we had given the Negro no education at all, we could probably have kept him contented for a good many years with just being ‘free.’  If we had given no Negro anything but a common-school chance, the race would have been pretty slow to develop discontent.  But Hightower went to Yale, and Du Bois went to Harvard and Germany, and Pickens went to Yale, and so on.  Thousands of colored men and women have been graduated from colleges of liberal arts.  And so they are not satisfied with conditions which would have been heavenly bliss to their grandfathers and grandmothers.”

“I know I’m stupid,” said J.W., a trifle ruefully, “but I’ve always supposed that education was good for everybody.  Now you seem to say that education makes people discontented.”

“Of course it does,” said Mr. Drury, “that’s the reason it is good for them.  Would you be content to call a one-room shack home, and live as the plantation hand lives?  If you would, the world’s profit out of you, and your own profit out of yourself, wouldn’t be much.  Real education does exactly mean discontent.  And the people who are discontented may be uncomfortable to live with, if we think they ought to be docile, but they get us forward.”