The report of the committee also suggests the heroic element in our work.  It brings to mind the obstacles and difficulties which we are called upon to overcome.  The illiteracy of the colored people is a fact immense in extent and dark in its prophetic significance.  Your hearts were rejoiced, I know, by the statements of the changes going on in the education of the colored children in several States through free schools.  The need of this movement will be appreciated when we remember the figures which bring before us the present illiterate condition of the people.  I present the outline of a report made in January, 1885, based on reports of Albion Tourgee, and on articles in the North American Review.  According to that report, seventy-three per cent. of the colored population of the South cannot read and write.  In the eight Gulf and Atlantic States, seventy-eight per cent. are in the same condition.  Over two millions of colored people in these eight States cannot read and write.  But this is not all.  We must take into account the rapid increase of the negroes.  In three States of the South they already outnumber the whites.  In eight States, they are about one-half the population.  In all the Southern States they increase faster than the white population.  From 1870 to 1880, in the eight States mentioned above, they increased thirty-four per cent., the whites only twenty-seven per cent.  The immigration of foreign-born whites will not change the proportionate difference of increase, as the foreign-born white population has decreased 30,000 since the war, and the immigration of northern-born whites amounts to only a fraction of one per cent.  According to the present rate of increase, the colored race in one hundred years from now will have a population many millions in excess of the whites, since, while it will take thirty-five years for the white race to double its numbers, the blacks will do so every twenty years.  In less than twenty-five years from this date, the colored race in the South will outnumber the whites in nearly all the States, and then the world will witness a conflict of races, the aspiration of the negro against the caste-prejudice of the white, the end and result of which no man can foresee.

These facts all point to the greatness of the work undertaken by this Association.  Christian education is the only education for a race having before it such a future.  The illiteracy which we deplore must be overcome, but something more than that; that change must be provided for, when the Negro in large numbers will pass from the quiet and peaceful pursuits of agriculture to be massed together in mine and factory and the work of the mechanic arts, but something more than that; intelligence for the burden of citizenship must be given, but something more than that; incentives to the accumulation of property and the building of homes for themselves and their families must be encouraged, but something more than that must be done.  If