At the same time, it is the belief of your committee that the pressing need of the hour is the fuller development of the leading institutions already established and larger equipment for the arduous work set before the American people in our Southern States.  For this end, steps should be taken towards securing their permanent endowment.  While in every way the general work of reaching the masses and saving them from their illiteracy is to be pressed, the time has come to place these leading schools upon a firmer foundation and to make them more conspicuous as centres.  For this they need to be amply endowed and maintained with steadily advancing educational courses, suited to giving those who are to become the leaders of a great people a broad and comprehensive education, abreast with the best in the times in which they are to do their work.

It is time to take comprehensive views and to plan for years to come.  Neither this generation nor the next is to see the end of the special work to be done to fit the freedmen successfully to meet the conditions of their freedom.  It has required centuries to qualify the Anglo-Saxon people for freedom; and we must expect that generation after generation will pass, even with the benefits of our experiments, experience and methods, before this people, upon whom the duties of free men have been thrust, can successfully discharge them.  There is call for great patience, for far-reaching plans, for large beneficence.  This question of the training of these eight millions of people is one of the most difficult set before the American people, and is worthy of the best thought of statesmen, patriots, philanthropists and Christians.

For our encouragement is the ardor of the people themselves; their readiness to receive an education; their position in a republic now far advanced; the progress already made; the growing interest in the States where they are most numerous to provide for them the means of a common school education; the army of teachers already in the field.

Believing in a wise Providence over-ruling the present and the future, we regard the problems before us, though great, not insoluble to faithful, wise and patient Christian effort along the lines upon which this Association has wrought.

We commend the wisdom and the foresight of this Association in the planting of these institutions of learning in favorable positions, its judicious economy in their management and its great skill in steadily advancing their scope and capability with insufficient resources and equipment.  Upon these foundations the work should be carried on, and large and permanent universities should be reared; and we commend these to the Christian people for increased annual gifts and larger permanent endowments that the great undertaking fail not.

* * * * *

Report on church work.

By Rev.  David Gregg, D.D., Chairman.