Our churches have not yet awakened to the vastness and promise of the home mission fields which they have put in charge of the American Missionary Association. They have not yet recognized the peculiar fitness of our free-church system for the people who have so lately come into personal freedom that the very word is indescribably precious to them. This Association ought now to have not only the means for a more ample support of its educational service, but also for the broadening of its distinctive church missions. The day has come for the planting of free Congregational churches among the shadowed millions of the South.
In the upbuilding of their minds and hearts, our fundamental work of Christian education has been developed into remarkable fruitage, and is steadily doing this imperative and successful service. This education has been broad enough to make intellectual and moral leaders. It has not been confined to those who can become only manual laborers. With prominent emphasis upon industrial training, as is evinced by the farms and gardens and workshops of our institutions all through the South, we have not shut the door against the higher training.
The Association has never given in to what may be termed the Southern theory of negro education, its confinement to the manual handicrafts, and the rudiments of primary school instruction. Nothing is more popular in the South than the practical limitation of educational opportunities for the negro people to the lines of manual training and the reserve of all the possibilities of a higher education to the white, dominant race. A prominent Southern journalist has expressed this view in the following terms: "A little education is all the negro needs. Let him learn the rudiments--to read, and to write, and to cipher, and be made to mix that knowledge with some useful labor. His only resource is manual labor." But one of the foremost colored men in the South has well said: "There is no defence or security for any, except in the highest intelligence and development of all. If anywhere there are efforts tending to curtail the fullest growth of the negro, let these efforts be[pg 125] turned into stimulating, encouraging, and making him the most useful and intelligent citizen."
The American Missionary Association, in addition to its general and industrial school training, has opened the doors of a higher education to all who seek to enter in. The fruition of this opportunity now appears at the very juncture when a call is coming from among the millions of the back country for free churches, pure churches, churches which emphasize virtue and intelligence. Our great schools are bringing to us young men and young women thoroughly fitted to go preaching and teaching among these millions. But how shall they go, except they be sent?
Talladega College, Ala.
The Industrial Department.
Agriculture.
Edgar A Bishop, B.S., Superintendent.
The work in the Agricultural Department the past year has been the most satisfactory of any in its history. The young men of the Junior Preparatory and Normal classes with several special students have taken the classroom work, using Gulley's "First Lessons in Agriculture" as a textbook. Among the topics considered are the following:
Origin, formation, and composition of soil. Composition of the plant. How plants feed and grow. Fertilization of the seed, and improvement of variety. Plant food in the soil and how developed. Preparing land for the crop. Cultivation of crop. Principles of drainage and irrigation. Manures and commercial fertilizers. Rotation of crops. Special diversified farming. Farm economy. Food and manure value of crops. How to propagate plants--pruning, grafting, budding, etc. Stock breeding: feeding and care; how to select for special purposes, detect unsoundness, determine age, etc.