3. The necessity of a high order of talent in the teachers and managers of our work. To understand thoroughly the needs of such pupils as crowd our schools, and to apply successfully the most approved educational methods, requires something more than an ordinary teacher. An eminent advocate of popular education has stated it as his belief that the most interesting and valuable improvements yet to be made in pedagogical science will be made in connection with the education of the colored people. But tyros and bunglers in teaching will never give us much that is interesting or valuable. The very best teaching ability must continually be employed in our schools and colleges, and be properly remunerated.
4. The relation of our work to the future of education in the South. The justification of all Northern missionary teaching in the South has been that it was designed to accomplish what the Southern people were not prepared to do themselves. To whatever extent they may in the future take up our work, it will still be our mission to maintain that helpful leadership which it has been our privilege to exercise from the beginning. Our institutions should be the best and do the best work of any in the South. We should be the first to discern the peculiar needs of Southern pupils and the first to introduce whatever is new and excellent in educational appliances. We ought, for instance, to have at once industrial departments connected with all our larger institutions. Every normal and college graduate should be able to use intelligently either the wood-working or the iron-working tools; and the same expenditure of time and money which the Harvard and Yale boys make in learning to wield the oar and the bat would accomplish this much desired end. Already our institutions are being visited by Southern teachers eager to witness the advanced methods of teaching already introduced. We should always be able to reward such visitors by showing them something which they have not seen before. Above all, we should send out from our institutions such noble specimens of young manhood and womanhood as shall prove a stimulus to the whole educational work in the South.
The destiny of the colored race is to be largely determined by the character of the young men and women now crowding forward into active life. The immediate future will demand all our resources, and more, to save these young people. In the more distant future, our success as influential leaders in education will depend largely upon the promptness with which our institutions are now put upon a substantial basis. Every consideration of past success and of present and future need enforces our plea that these endowments should be provided at once.
Rev. J. M. Williams, of the Mendi Mission, died at Freetown, February 21. Mr. Williams was a native of British Guiana, and born in 1828. He was early impressed with a love to the Saviour and to Africa by his grandmother Christina, a native of the interior of Congo. He was educated in Ebenezer Chapel School, and studied theology with the pastor of the church; became assistant minister, then tutor in training school at Clarkson. But in his own words: “The promise of my childhood made to my grandmother that I would carry the word of God to Africa for her, when a man; this promise made with no other object than to soothe her in her tears for Africa, grew up with me, till I felt I would rather travel from town to town with my Bible, reading and publishing Christ the Saviour to my benighted brethren in Africa, than fill the most exalted and lucrative position in British Guiana or anywhere else.” In 1861 he went to Africa, and with the exception of three years spent in England remained there till the time of his death. Mr. Chase, who visited him in 1880 at Kaw Mendi, where the last five years of his life were spent, says: “For Africa Mr. Williams’ effort may be considered a success. Very few missionaries could accomplish so much in so short a time in any field in Africa.”
GENERAL NOTES.
AFRICA.
——West Central Africa is to receive four missionaries from Oberlin, who will go out under appointment of the A. B. C. F. M.
——The London Standard has received from Durban a dispatch announcing the return of Mr. Richards, a missionary, who has been well received by Oumzila. The King has permitted him to establish a mission in his possessions.