The South contains a little more than one-third of the population of the country. It has 3,550,425 persons over ten years old who cannot read; the West has only 409,175. The South has 1,137,303 voters who cannot read their ballots; the West has only 217,403. Have patriots no duties here?
The Negroes in the South are more accessible to the Gospel than any other people on earth; they welcome it; they are near us, speak our language, their fervency will add a warmer element to our piety, and they seem called of God to carry the Gospel to the land of their fathers. Have Christians no duties to them?
—The American Missionary Association bears to these caste-oppressed races the help they need in education, practical morality and piety. It has founded or fostered permanent educational institutions for training ministers and teachers. In its forty-five schools are 6,962 scholars, and its former students are now teaching 100,000 pupils.
Its church work lays sure foundations. Sixty-two churches are under its care, with 4,127 members—an average of sixty-six—nearly all the growth of fifteen years. It has seventy-four theological students in training; has prepared many ministers of the colored race, and has sent out nine colored missionaries to Africa.
Seldom, if ever, has so much been accomplished in so short a time at so small a cost.
OUR FINANCES.
We have reached the half-way station in our annual journey. The statement of receipts, in this number of the Missionary, is the sixth since the last annual meeting. Our friends and patrons naturally desire to know how we have weathered the stormy seas, and what the prospect is of reaching port in good condition, and we desire to tell them frankly and fully. We might refer them to the monthly report, but we know that many of them are too busy to keep accounts for us, their agents.
We know too well how the financial pressure of the year has crippled one and another of them. Their letters—not empty, either—have told us, in confidence, from time to time, of their losses, and we know that their gifts this year have testified to unusual self-denials, and to deepening convictions of the greatness of their work through us. And the best of it all is, that these gifts have not diminished from either of the classes from which our work is supported, the living or the dead. For the ability to make this statement, and in times like these, we thank you, generous friends, and we thank Him whose money you are permitted to administer. We take courage, and congratulate the poor for whom we labor, and whose hope is in your remembrance of them.