NATIONAL EDUCATION—PREPARATION FOR IT.
In connection with the educational bill, which passed the Senate last week, a word concerning the American Missionary Association. Are we to have a national uprising of popular sentiment and legislative action with reference to the education of all peoples within our borders, but especially in the South? How signally, in the providence of God, did this Association forecast the need, and how wonderfully has it, these years past, been preparing the way. If it had done no more, it has proved to all the world, past all cavil, this—the cultivability of the negro, the practicability of education for the poor blacks and also for the “poor whites” of the South. Its Christian schools of all grades, planted here and there in all the States, have led the way and established beginnings of the utmost importance. These schools, by the sheer force of their own excellence, and results so signal as to arrest universal attention, have lived down the most desperate prejudices, and commanded the most emphatic testimonials from all classes and from those highest in authority. Never has a grand Christian enterprise shown itself more certain of good results; never did a benevolent undertaking more remarkably manifest its self-perpetuating, self-propagating force. It has given a new complexion to the entire “negro problem” in this country. It has successfully asserted the right of the lowliest of all citizens to share in the benefits and advantages of education. The Association, by the largeness of its plans, the boldness of its project, the manifestation on the spot of its work, by its public advocacy throughout the North, has served to press constantly upon the public attention the exact nature of the great emergency in the field of popular education. When were ever before the wisdom of a measureless benevolence and the audacity of a glorious faith more manifestly justified in their results?
But will not the new Congressional scheme for promoting popular education in the States of the South, render somewhat less urgent the work and the claim of the American Missionary Association? By no means! Just the reverse is true. Money alone will not educate anybody. If the first need be that of more money, at least the second necessity will be that of suitable teachers. Precisely here, to meet this necessity, is seen the almost prophetic, certainly the providential, anticipatory work of the Association, getting things ready for the great stroke of truly national statesmanship now proposed.
To say that the American Missionary Association should have, at once, placed at its disposal five times its present resources to meet the new exigency, would be to make a statement altogether temperate, considerate and reasonable. The opportunity is one that is transcendently inviting.—Rev. S. Gilbert in The Advance.