When the Asylum was no longer needed, the city of Wilmington undertaking to care for its poor, with the consent of Mrs. Perry, the funds which she had invested in it were transferred to the Brewer Normal School in Greenwood, S. C. This school so enlisted her thoughts and sympathies, that she determined to make over to it, two years before her death, the amount she had designed for it at her decease. Accordingly, she paid over to the Association, for the benefit of the school, two one-thousand-dollar U. S. Bonds, which realized $2,416.25. The writer remembers how her face shone after the act was done. Indeed, giving seemed to be, to her, a supreme luxury. The whole amount which she contributed to the Association, for its work of physical relief and Christian education, was not far from $4,000. And the school which she has left in her daughter’s name, the support of which is mainly from her bequest, will go on perpetuating her influence for the years and generations to come. Many, in the great day, will rise up and call her blessed. Are there not other dear saints of God, friends of the poor and the needy, who will imitate her spirit and her example?
THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES.
We attempt to give, though it is difficult, a condensation of the address made by President Buckham, of Burlington, Vt., at the Boston Anniversary of the A. M. A., May 29th, 1878. It has been published in full in the Congregationalist, and in pamphlet form already.
The negro, it must be confessed, has lost the place he once held as an attractive object of philanthropy. Invested with the legal rights of a man, and thus by necessity thrust forward into comparison and competition with other men, he not only exhibits his inferiority on a conspicuous stage, but manifests some traits which make him repulsive and odious. The negro cause has thus sunk from an impassioned crusade to a common-place charity.
The Negro Question.
And yet the Negro Question is still the great American Question. Perhaps it is with questions like this as with the movements of a battle; those at a distance see them more clearly than those in the thick of action. The intelligent Englishman or Frenchman will tell you in an instant that our great problem is the negro question—the political, as dependent on the social and moral condition of the freedmen.
With a population as large as that of the colonies at the Revolution, with the full privileges of American citizens theirs by constitutional right, they hold in their hands—the very hands but recently manacled in cruel and degrading bondage—the balance of political power in the nation. As parties are now divided, the supremacy of one or the other depends on the negro vote; and whether the negro vote shall be the vote of the negro, or merely the vote by the negro, will depend on the degree of manhood he reaches through his social and moral condition.