—Governor St. John, of Kansas, believes that the colored exodus has only begun; that it is not unlikely that it will soon re-open, and reach to hundreds of thousands in its numbers.
—The current catalogue of Howard University reports a total of 236 students for the year. Of these, 21 are in the Theological department, 64 in the Medical, 10 in the Law, 17 in the College, 16 in the Preparatory, and 87 in the Normal. This Association for the third year sustains one-half the expense of the Theological department. Rev. Dr. Craighead of this city, many years connected with The Evangelist, has been appointed to the chair of Theology, made vacant by the death of Prof. Lorenzo Westcott. Dr. Craighead has accepted, and is to enter upon duty this fall. The Law and Medical departments are under the instruction of resident lawyers and doctors in Washington. Rev. Wm. W. Patton, D.D., is President and Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy, Natural Theology, and Evidences of Revealed Religion, also Instructor in Hebrew.
An appropriation of ten thousand dollars was made by the last Congress exclusively for the benefit of the College; not a dollar is to go to sustain the professional courses. It is fitting that the Government, which, through the Freedmen’s Bureau, did so much to found the institution, should help it along in its straits.
Prof. R. I. Greener, of the Law department, before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in session at Saratoga, joined issue with Frederick Douglass in the discussion of the exodus question. He is a man of platform popularity. It must have been a touching scene when Col. Thos. J. Kirkpatrick, of Virginia, and Frederick Douglass, in the meeting of the Howard Board of Trust, joined hands in mutual expression of regard—the ex-slaveholder and the ex-slave.
—The Marysville College in East Tennessee, founded before the war by the New School Presbyterians, now under the presidency of Rev. Peter Mason Bartlett, who has also a brother in one of the professorships, received some of the funds of the Freedmen’s Bureau, upon the condition that its doors should ever stand open to colored as well as white students. This provision has been carried out in spite of local prejudice, so that all along there have been a few students of the African race among its numbers. This institution is to be praised for fidelity to the bond. Some schools that received from the same fund, on the same conditions, have not stood to the contract.
—Aunt Kelly, now living at Troy, Missouri, at an advanced age, but “bred, born, and raised in ole Virginny,” told the writer, that, when a young woman, she sawed the lumber for the building of the State University. For that matter, the labor in building the mass of the literary institutions of the South was performed by the colored people. It is, then, only a piece of reciprocity that the several States of that region should now provide public schools for that class of their citizens. Old Virginia appropriates ten thousand dollars a year to the Hampton Institute; South Carolina aids the Claflin University (Methodist), and other States are doing a like generous thing.
Africa.
—Of the twenty-three new missionaries sent out by the Church Missionary Society during the last year, three were for West Africa and five for the Nyanza Mission. Of the eighteen new this year, two are for West Africa and two for the Nyanza Mission, to be stationed at Mpwapwa. Mr. Price is, for the present, the only ordained missionary at the station. Mr. Cole is to devote himself largely to the industrial interests of the Mission with a view to its self-support at as early a day as may be found possible. Dr. Baxter and Mr. Last have already occupied the field for a year. In the instructions given them at a farewell meeting it was said: “Not only is it made more and more clear that Mpwapwa is in a sense the key to the Lake district, and likely to remain so for many years to come, and hence important with a view to the work carried on in the interior by other societies as well as the C. M. S., but there is also no doubt that from it, as a centre, missionary work may be carried on both among the natives inhabiting the Usagara Mountains and amid the manly and numerous race inhabiting the Ugogo country.”