ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS A DAY.
What can be done with it? We can sustain efficiently our current work of educating teachers and preachers and the planting of churches. In the progress of development, more requires more. If the Association did not need increased receipts it would be evidence of lack of growth. There is no such lack. New demands are springing up at every point, and it is wise economy to meet these demands. They are simply the healthy development of legitimate missionary work.
Just now there is urgent demand for the increase of facilities for promoting industrial education. The South is arising into a new life. New fields of labor are rapidly opening. Skilled workmen are wanted. The possibilities of agricultural prosperity are becoming better understood. The aspiring youth of both sexes are comprehending their opportunities, and the industrial departments in connection with our institutions are patronized as never before. We ought to make the most of them now.
We need more means for supplying the minds of those hungering for knowledge with good reading. The colored people have few, if any, books or periodicals. We ought to have the means at once for furnishing fifty libraries and reading-rooms at as many different points. Such help to those willing to help themselves to some extent should be provided.
The students leaving our schools to go forth as teachers may be numbered by thousands. These explore the dark places of the land. They open schools in such buildings as can be found, or, finding none, teach out of doors. We need means to aid many such with supplemental support, making it possible for them to continue their schools longer than the few months provided for by the limited State appropriations. Thousands of dollars could be used wisely in this way. The opportunity now for temperance work is more promising than ever. A temperance wave has been sweeping some portions of the South. Our students are thoroughly indoctrinated in the principles of total abstinence. They make the best advocates of the cause that can be had for many localities. It is a crucial period. The time to do this work is now—now, while the great questions at issue are being agitated and settled. We ought to have means for extending our efforts to the utmost in this direction.
Of more importance still is evangelistic work, supplemental to the labors of our pastors. This is coming into more than usual prominence. Our students have had thorough training for it, and no little experience in it during their course of study. A score of them in every Southern State could be set to work with profit, if we had the money for such outlay. Nothing could do more for immediate results in developing a pure Christianity among the untaught and unsaved poor of the South.
We might also, with a thousand dollars a day, do more than we have ever done to foster the growth of right and permanent institutions in all our fields of labor. This is the great and urgent necessity. Out of Christian churches and schools will flow all the benefits demanded by a Christian civilization. For this especially we emphasize our appeal. To what better use can the Christians and patriots of our country devote a thousand dollars a day?
A friend, noting the annual average addition of churches as five or six, raised the question whether the time had not come for doubling that rate. The Association is glad to recognize this worthy aspiration and itself to avow the spirit of it, and still further to remind the friends that the disposition of leaders on the field to magnify the work of each year is also in the same line. Nevertheless, we find that those who become in some sense responsible for the nurture and support of these ecclesiastical children born to us become conservative instead of becoming rash, as is sometimes averred. Yet we are able to give assurance that the Field Superintendent and his associates, with their eyes upon the whole field, watching the germs and their unfolding, are only anxious to set out these plants of the Lord's house as fast as is at all consistent. We also see, in no far-away future, a large church work for us as the fruitage of our school work.
A prize of $75 is given annually to the best male Greek scholar in the High School at Newport, R. I. The best examination this year was by the daughter of George Rice, the colored steward of the steamer Pilgrim. As she was not eligible to the award a gentleman from New York sent her $75 in gold.