The tribute paid by the President and his Cabinet to your work was none too high, and forms a most encouraging augury, I think, for the future prosperity of your institution.

I cannot close without assuring you that the modesty shown by yourself in the exercises was most favourably commented upon by all the members of our party.
With best wishes for the continued advance of your most useful and patriotic undertaking, kind personal regards, and the compliments of the season, believe me, always, Very sincerely yours, John Addison Porter, Secretary to the President.
To President Booker T.Washington, Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute, Tuskegee, Ala.
Twenty years have now passed since I made the first humble effort at Tuskegee, in a broken-down shanty and an old hen-house, without owning a dollar's worth of property, and with but one teacher and thirty students.

At the present time the institution owns twenty-three hundred acres of land, one thousand of which are under cultivation each year, entirely by student labour.

There are now upon the grounds, counting large and small, sixty-six buildings; and all except four of these have been almost wholly erected by the labour of our students.

While the students are at work upon the land and in erecting buildings, they are taught, by competent instructors, the latest methods of agriculture and the trades connected with building.
There are in constant operation at the school, in connection with thorough academic and religious training, thirty industrial departments.
All of these teach industries at which our men and women can find immediate employment as soon as they leave the institution.