wreck. At the age of 88 he made this great bequest to the American Missionary Association. He wisely left to the directors of the association the manner of its expenditure, premising that only the income should be expended annually and suggesting that it should be used largely as a student aid fund of $100 a year for promising students.

With this reenforcement the association launched out in a wide expansion, so that it subsequently found itself involved in a debt that compelled immediate attention. The sinking fund of $100,000 was established and a policy of economy adopted.

At the jubilee meeting in 1896, held in Boston, the association was welcomed by the governor of the State and the mayor of the city, and the sermon was preached by Dr. Lyman Abbott, editor of the Outlook, successor of Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, of the Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. The receipts of this year were $340,798.65 and the expenditures $311,223.35; the debt having decreased from $96,000 to $66,000. The income of the Hand fund was $68,830. This year was the fiftieth anniversary of the association. The will of Mr. Hand had left a large additional sum to the cause. From 1860 to 1893 the expenditures of the American Missionary Association in the South nearly reached the large sum of $11,610,000. In 1898 the association reported 6 chartered institutions, 44 normal and graded and 27 common schools, with 413 teachers and 12,348 students.

Of all the mission educational enterprises of the Northern Protestant evangelical churches, the American Missionary Association seems to have borne in mind most completely the idea of working in connection with the Southern States and people in the upbuilding of the common school for the colored race. It has, more than others, discouraged the mischievous habit of engrafting the old-time parochial school on the churches that have been developed by its missionary activity. In three of these States-Virginia, Mississippi, and Georgia-at different times its larger schools have been subsidized by the State in the interest of their normal and industrial departments. It has not shown the usual desire to retain its original authority or to utilize its bounty to acquire the perpetual educational control of its schools. Four of the most important schools of the higher order with which it has been connected and which have been liberally aided by it are now entirely separated from it-Howard, Washington, D. C.; Hampton, Virginia; Berea, Kentucky, and Atlanta University, Georgia. The explanation of this may be found in the fact, already stated, that although the American Missionary Association first united with several of the evangelical Protestant churches in its work among the colored people, each of these associations in turn has preferred to separate itself from others and organize on a more decided and exclusive denominational basis, looking to the church it represents for its support and guided by the sectarian policy thereof. This has left the American Missionary Association, like the A. B. C. F. M., virtually in charge for the evangelical Congregational Church, It was in New England, which for one hundred and fifty years of the colonial life was exclusively committed to this form of Congregational Church government, the only ecclesiastical polity that owes its origin to the Christian people of this Republic, that the people's common school was developed and alone sustained until the close of the war of independence. That original interest in and connec tion with the common school by the Congregational clergy and laity has never been lost by the members of this great and growing religious organization. It has not, like the three great remaining Evangelical Protestant churches, been ruptured by a sectional secession from the original body; as, previous to the close of the civil war there were, outside a few congregations in the border cities, no Congregational churches in the Southern States. Hence it has been called to encounter no sharp conflict with a rival church of its own household and has been left more exclusively to the radical work of preparing the colored race for a

superior form of religion through a general uplift of mental, moral, social, and industrial life, in which all the habits and the general spirit of society will become the most powerful teachers and the new citizenship of the race become at once a university and a church. There is nothing in the idea or the policy of the American Missionary Association that will forbid any or all of its present educational foundations, as new times and changed circumstances might demand, to retire amicably from its denomination control and become independent or even State institutions for the mental, moral, and industrial training of the class of students that has always been found under its benign and progressive influence.

In 1891 the American Missionary Association reported 8 schools of the higher and secondary type, 4 seminaries for the mountain whites in North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, 2 for Indians in Nebraska, and 93 other normal, industrial, graded, and primary schools. Its church work is almost entirely confined to the very poor among the Indians, and the lowland colored people of the South, with a growing interest for the people of the Southern mountains. Altogether there are 106 schools, with 15,252 pupils, and 242 churches, with 708 missionaries and 12,905 church members, the majority in the South. A bureau of woman's work

is connected with the association.

THE FREEDMAN'S AID SOCIETY OF THE METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH.

The first report of this society furnishes a complete account of its organization in 1866, the reasons for it, and its preliminary operations until May, 1868. It was established in response to a call, dated March 8, 1866, and signed by Bishop D. W. Clark, representing the board of bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church. During the progress of the civil war the original work for the Freedmen in the North was carried on by a variety of Freedman's aid associations formed in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago during the years 1862–63. The first call was for the relief of the physical condition of the "contrabands," and it has already been related how this aid was dispensed largely through the agency of the Union Army, while supplies and money were forthcoming from these and private agencies. In 1864 the general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church indorsed these additional methods of charitable aid. But as early as 1862-63 the call was made for additional effort in behalf of the mental and moral elevation of these people. Teachers were sent to the seaboard in 1862 and to the valley of the Mississippi in 1863. The physical needs of the Freedmen were so well supplied by the arrangements for their self-support on the vacated lands and in the Army, as soldiers and laborers, that after 1863 the chief need of assistance was for the maintenance of schools and teachers.

The beginning of this great work seemed at first to be an open door of invitation by Divine Providence for the long-desired and prayed-for, but slow in coming, union of the different divisions of the Protestant Church in some one grand and voluntary enterprise for the uplift of humanity. But it was soon found that here the churches were the first to break the bond. It was decided that the educational workers among the negroes should be members of the churches of the evangelical type of creed. This, of course, would leave outside the large majority of the American people whose "good will to man" was manifested by undenominational and practical labors and sacrifices, rather than through the regular channels of church work. First of all, the Friends, then the United Presbyterian Church, in 1863, inaugurated special denominational work among the freedmen. Later followed another division of the Presbyterian, and the United Brethren, and one type of the Baptists. In 1864 a committee was chosen by the old-school Presbyterian Church (North) for the subsidizing of a proper missionary work.

The Congregational Evangelical churches in 1865 reorganized the American

Missionary Association, that had existed since 1849, and reconsecrated it to this special work, and proposed to raise $250,000 per annum for this purpose. In the same year the Methodist Episcopal Church organized "The Freedman's Aid Society," and the Northern Baptists of the regular "persuasion" called for $100,000 as a fund for denominational work in the South. The five leading commissions already on the ground had fallen apart, the two in the West as a rule employing members of the evangelical churches as teachers, while the three in the East-Boston, New York, and Philadelphia-did not make church membership a necessary qualification for any position in the work. By 1866, despite vigorous efforts to combine these organizations in one free-school society, every teacher from the undenominational societies had been displaced and every Protestant religious sect save two had adopted special plans.

It was inevitable that these great ecclesiastical bodies should all, in time, come to see that the field of denominational missionary effort for the final evangelization of the 6,000,000 of the freedmen and the legitimate propagandism of their own churches was such as had never before been opened. In place of sending the missionaries of the cross beyond the sea to distant heathen or Mohammedan lands, all under foreign governments which were not always friendly to such enterprises, here was a new American citizenship of 6,000,000 of our own freedmen, just emerging from two hundred and fifty years of bondage, needing almost everything, with an ardent desire to " learn their letters," and receive aid and comfort of all kinds from the North and the nation to whom they were indebted for their newfound freedom.

The report of the Freedman's Aid Society referred to declares, however, that they were more anxious to have schools for the freedmen and their children than even to consider the founding of missions. This was very natural, since during the period of their former slavery the negroes had all nominally been converted from paganism to about as much of Christianity as was possible for a people in their condition of ignorance and dependence. Their new religious zeal, as usual, took the form of a direction to their own former denominational bodies, largely Baptist and Methodist, and often became a superstitious and fanatical caricature of the more enlightened denominational spirit of these great Christian sects.

The desire to preach was very pronounced among the leading class of the freedmen, and it was soon apparent that one of the first uses of their liberty was to be the formation of great religious denominational bodies which, under the old names, really were the beginning of a church organization founded upon and representing the then existing condition of religious and moral culture among these people. The white clergymen of the South, although often greatly honored for their zealous labors of love" among the slave population, were generally dispensed with at this crisis in the new life of the race. It was therefore natural that all the Northern churches and clergy of the evangelical type should hasten to provide for the then vacant pulpits and buildings, and on the strength of such work as they had done before the war, and their patriotic services during the four years of the sectional conflict, endeavor to take the reins and direct the civilization of the rising race. In the words of the report, "The control of the educational work connected with missions was as necessary to success as the work itself, and this necessity, soon observed by every denomination that entered the inviting field presented by the South, was the chief care and guidance of denominational schools."

Of course, by this decision, the church abandoned the ground already taken by the northern American people, that the most effective and reliable moral agency for educating and training American children and youth was the undenominational common school. This conclusion had been slowly reached through the

experience and perpetual conflicts of the two hundred and fifty years since the passage of the original public-school statute by the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1647. While a majority of the ecclesiastical organizations did favor the establishment of the American common school in the reconstructed States of the South, and the more advanced of them retired from the support of primary schooling for the negroes as fast as it was supplied by the States and communities where they labored, and made it a permanent feature of their policy to train teachers for all grades of these schools, the schools of the Methodist Episcopal Church were, at first, as far as possible, connected with churches. In 1868 the majority of the school teachers were the missionary workers, the same buildings being used for the school houses and churches, and the administration of the entire enterprise was so interlocked that it would be impossible to separate in any way the exclusively educational plant.

But the inevitable tendency of American thought and action in respect to universal education planted every Southern State, by 1870, on the American policy of an unsectarian common school, and, outside a few Southern communities, the attempt to subsidize denominational schools in these States has not been a success. In obedience to this condition of affairs and urged by the impossibility of educating 6,000,000 people, all in 1866 practically illiterate, by Northern Christian charity, all these great mission schools, like the denominational colleges and academies of the North, have modified their sectarian character, and to some extent conformed to the policy of similar institutions of learning in the new South. Still, in testing this plan of school education among the negroes, it should always be understood that the only just and correct point of view is the whole field and its necessities as surveyed and organized by the larger Protestant Christian sects, and that the educational was always subordinate and tributary to the need of the religious uplift and moral reformation of these people.

It is not strictly in line with the purpose of this essay to give an elaborate record of the doings and results of this great missionary movement in the South for the past thirty-five years. As a feeder to the common-school system, on which the race must more and more rely for the training of its children and youth for reliable manhood and womanhood and good American citizenship, it has maintained, and must for a considerable period to come continue to maintain, a vital and necessary connection with the founding of the American common school. It will be observed that, more and more, its academical and normal schools are conforming to the methods of instruction and discipline and especially of industrial training that are best known under the general title of "The new education." Still, the fundamental purpose of all these great and useful bodies is the same as that of the churches by which they are supported and also mainly relied on to shape their policy, and whose teachers are chiefly found in all important positions in their school work.

It is not necessary that the most earnest advocate of the American common school in all its departments should look with disfavor or in any spirit of hostile criticism on any of these great schools, which are regarded by their workers in conformity to popular nomenclature as "Christian" instead of “secular." The great work of the moral and spiritual uplift of mankind is the radical motive of these schools, as of the Christian churches, and much as we may deplore the inevitable results of these sectarian divisions and the hindrance to educational development by the contentions and rivalries of the denominational system of schooling in general, there was never a better work done by any people in any land than has been achieved by the results of forty years of missionary and educational activity in the type of schools now under consideration, and there has been no expenditure of time, money, and effort for the general uplifting of God's "little ones" that has resulted in more benefit than has been achieved by the disbursement of more

than $50,000,000 through the schools and churches in the social and industrial improvement of the colored and white people of the humbler class in 16 States. The churches of the Methodist Episcopal body of the North responded to the original appeal with remarkable promptitude, although the country was in the agonies of one its periodical spasms of "financial depression." In the seventeen months ending March 31, 1868, $58,477.69 ($54,231.73 in cash) was collected, of which $35,815.83 was expended in field work in 9 States. There were 59 schools with 124 teachers, and, in 1868, 7,000 pupils. Only half the teachers drew full support from the territory and the remainder cost $10 per month. A large nunber of the teachers were ministers of the gospel who labored both in church and school, and all the teachers served in the Sunday as well as the day schools. The general outcome of the work could not be better described than in the words of the superintendent:

Our schools have rendered essential aid in the work of restoring social order: in bringing about friendly relations between the employers and laborers; in promoting habits of cleanliness, industry, economy, purity, and morality; rendering more emphatic the grand distinctions between right and wrong, falsehood and truth; enforcing fidelity to contracts; portraying the terrible consequences of intemperance, licentiousness, profanity, lying, and stealing; teaching them to respect the rights of others while they are prompt to claim protection for theinselves. The teachers have furnished for the freedmen a vast amount of valuable information in regard to the practical matters of life which could be obtained nowhere else. The schools have met a great want which no military or political organization could supply, and without which it will be impossible for peace and harmony to be restored. Our teachers have been pioneers in the work of reconciliation, and are laying a foundation upon which the most enduring superstructure can be reared.

In fact the only fair and appropriate way of estimating this peculiar combination of church, school, and home in the Southern educational work during the past generation among the negroes is to regard it as a vast university of all work; a continental training in the new American civilization to which the younger generation of the freedmen had been so wonderfully summoned. Like the lyceum of the old and the Chautauqua assembly and summer school of the later times, it was a characteristic development of our American educational life, as sincere and praiseworthy in motive, in social and religious as in industrial and political affairs. As the years go on and the educators of the colored race come to a full recognition of their opportunities and obligations in respect to this class of pupils, much of what was an imperative necessity in the first generation will be dropped and the more important of these seminaries will become the permanent academical, industrial, and collegiate foundations for the increasing numbers of this race. And then it may be seen that the apparent presumption of naming a school of 500 boys and girls in the elements of useful knowledge, the first generation of their people ever gathered in a schoolroom, a " college" or "university," has been justified by giving to the country half a century later a class of institutions of the higher education in the best sense, seminaries of the higher Christian civilization, "universities" more in accordance with the grand ideal of John Milton than are yet to be found in any of the great educational institutions of to-day. The report for 1868, from which these facts are drawn, was accepted with marked favor by the general conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church for that year, and from that day to the present the Freedman's Aid Society has gone steadily forward along the high road to success. The conference took a wide and practical view of its duties in the situation. In its announcement it says: the Southern States are fully reconstructed and a wise common-school system is established, and a returning prosperity shall enable the maintenance of free schools, the work of this society may possibly be superseded. Already the society reports the establishment of three normal schools at Nashville, Tenn., Huntsville,

When