$10,000,000 has gone into the school and church work for the Negro, both alike educational.  There are some 200 schools carried on in the South by different benevolent organizations, having over 28,000 colored youth in them.  Of these, ninety are colleges or high schools, and furnish teachers and educated leaders for this race.  Three-quarters of a million dollars a year flows southward from Northern generosity to this work.  And besides this, is the work being done by the South itself for the colored youth in its public schools.  A million Negroes are in the 15,000 colored schools of the South to-day, being taught by 15,000 teachers of their own color, the best of whom have been educated in these schools nurtured by Northern benevolence.  And what is the result?  The illiteracy in this race diminished 10 per cent. between 1870 and 1880, showing the eagerness of the people for improvement.  It is estimated that two millions of the blacks can now read the Bible for themselves.  And the universities for higher education find the Negro as susceptible to the best culture, as capable of receiving thorough discipline and of being highly educated as the white boys and girls in our Northern colleges.  The time is not far distant when colored college graduates, instead of being reckoned by hundreds as now, will be numbered by thousands, and when we shall see some Mark Hopkins in ebony.

The time has gone by when intelligent men can talk about the inferiority of this race.  When representative Southern men declare that they were mistaken in their former view, when such men as ex-Governor Brown, of Georgia, convinced by the examinations of our Atlanta University, publicly declares, “I was wrong; I am converted,” that ought to be enough.  But if not, the men of recognized ability and success among the blacks refute the old misrepresentation, now being revived in some quarters.  When our Government sends its ministers abroad, Frederick Douglass and John M. Langston; when Senator Bruce and Representative Lynch are regarded as peers of their white brethren in the political arena; when college chairs are ably filled by such men as Professor Gregory, of Howard University; when colored delegates captivate a National council by their eloquence and ability; when Harvard University and Cornell University, by the choice of the students themselves, elect colored men to be their representative orators, surely it is much too late in the day to talk of the inferiority of the colored race.  They are as well endowed by the Creator as any people in the world, and with training, culture, and a fair chance they will play their part in the world as well as any.  It is such a people that we may predict will have a large share in adding to our National prosperity in the future.